•ECONO COPY, 
16b9. 




LilRABY OF CONGRESS. 

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Cha^T..!... Copyright No 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



CHARACTER NOT CREEDS 



REFLECTIONS 
FKOM HEARTH AND PLOW-BEAM 



BY 

/ 
DANIEL FOWLER DEWOLF, A.M., Ph.D 



The persistent effort to grow in Wisdom and Goodness, through the proper develop- 
ment and use of our intellectual, our humane (moral), and other spiritual faculties, 
responsive to ever urgent divine influences; — this is Religion; it is Philosophy; it is the 
Privilege, the Duty, the Glory of man. 



CINCINNATI : 
THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY. 

1899. 



1 






30555 



COPYKIGHT, 1899, 

By DANIEL FOWLER DEWOLF. 







RopcfuUy Dedicated 



TO ALL THOSE -WHO, 

IN FELLOWSHIP WITH THE ACTIVE, SYMPATHETIC LIFE OF CHRIST, 

AND WITH THE 

GREAT PROPHETS OF THE RACE, 

FROM 

CONFUCIUS, HOMER, THE HEBREW LEADERS, TO THE FATHERS 

OP THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, TO HORACE MANN, 

SPURGEON, PHILLIPS BROOKS, 

BEGIN TO APPRECIATE THE HIGH PRIVILEGED HEIRSHIP OF HUMANITY, 
THROUGH ITS CONSCIOUS KINSHIP TO DIVINITY. 



THE MOTIVE. 



" It may be glorious to write 

Thoughts that will glad the two or three 
High souls, hke those far stars that come in sight 
Once in a century ; 

But better far it is to speak 

One simple word, which now and then 
Shall waken their free nature in the weak 
^ And friendless sons of men ; 

To write some earnest word or line, 

Which, seeking not the praise of art, 
Shall make a clearer faith and virtue shine 

In the untutored heart ". — Lowell. 

" It is my opinion that out of the present condition of social 
unrest which I see every-where around me, men will find their 
way back to a truer view of the religion of Christ". — A leading 
western lawyer, quoted approvingly by Bishop Henry C. Potter. 

" It is no longer possible, in an age of searching inquiry, to put 
the new wine of awakened thought about the universal truths of 
Christ into the old bottles of the historic creeds". — Rev. John 
Stevens, Glamis, Scotland ; representing the new Scotch thought. 

" The more truly we believe in the incarnate Deity, the more 
devoutly we must believe in the essential glory of humanity". — 

Bishop Philips Brooks. 

(V.) 



VI THE MOTIVE. 

" T fear to prescribe to the majesty of Love, let him give king- 
doms or flower leaves. The man who works at home helps more 
certainly than he who works in charities. The only real gift is a 
portion of thyself ". — Emerson. 

'' Why should I follow Luther? I know the Greek New Testa- 
ment as well as he knows it". — Zwingli, 1531. 

" I consider religion the most important business of man ; I 
therefore wish to ascend to its source, unalloyed by human author- 
ity ". — Luther, 1529. 

" Religion is for earth. There is no interest beyond its con- 
cern. To every aflection and relation it adds a divine, soul en- 
larging sympathy. To all the triumphs of intellect it adds spirit 
discernment, which recognizes the largest and the subtlest rela- 
tions, and connects all with the ever active divine beneficence ". 
— Spurgeon, to his usual congregation of eight thousand, 1871. 

" The Theological Seminaries are not in touch with the times. 
They are not preparing men who are able to grapple with the 
situation in which the Christian church finds itself. A new order 
of things is demanded. Meanwhile, we are drifting and precious 
time is being lost ".—President Harper of the University of Chi- 
cago, 1899. 

" It [The Educational System] despises Religion ; not Theology, 
— talk about God, — but the binding or training to religious duties. 
It despises Politics; that is to say, the science of the relations 
and duties of men to each other ; of the operations of men upon 
themselves and society ; the proper offices of art, science and 
labor themselves; the foundations of jurisprudence, and the 
broad principles of commerce ; the honorableness of every man 
who fills his proper place in society, however humble; refine- 
ment, its value and attain ableness by all. The elements of these 
may be taught even to youth ". — Ruskin. 



THE MOTIVE. Vll 

The general sympathy in Booker Washington's 
and the late Bishop Hay good's most wise and hu- 
mane effort "to civilize and Christianize the mil- 
lions of colored Americans, by a system of indus- 
trial training ; teaching thrift, economy, the dignity 
of labor, the honor and value of industrial interests 
to knit all classes into the business interests of the 
world that they may secure that sine qua non of a 
civilized and Christian condition, comfortable, re- 
fined homes", all this emphasizes our contention 
for organization on a re-valuation of human, — hu- 
mane, — interests, as suggested in the project of a 
"Kingdom of God on earth". 

The late Spanish war, with its sublime incidents 
and its urgent problems, is a clarion call out of the 
cruel indifference to human interests which has 
characterized the so-called Christian system, to 
more practical methods of meeting the imminent 
demands of the times, through a quicker sense of 
individual and social responsibility for prevailing 
conditions. 

See further. Chapters I., VII. and VIII., on the 
feasibility of organizing humane interests deeper 
into the daily life ; touching educational, indus- 
trial, economic and other social interests ; but with- 
out even skirting the region of "Socialism". 

A between-the-lines purpose of other chapters, to 
say the truth, is to show the inadequacy, and often 
irrelevancy, of the sacerdotal sectarian hour-a-week 
religion, — as a millenium-breeding influence. 



TABLE OF CONTEXTS. 



CHAPTER L 

CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

How the era of this thought was made to dav.n on our county, 
and, like a celestial maelstrom, to draw and organize into 
beneficent activities hitherto chaos. — The county ciub,its 
work defined. — Tlie discussion of the above question, one 
of its incidents ,,..,, , . , 1 

CHAPTER II. 

THE SITUATION. 

The situation : Economic, social, political, and ecclesiastical, 

in America, outlined by the president 10 

CHAPTER III. 

THE veteran's PAPER. 

Sectarian religion. — Its fruits in the family and neighbor- 
hood. — Results from its multiplied church organizations 
in rural districts, villages, and small cities. — Consequent 
apathy and infidelity, despair, suicide, self-abandon 25 

CHAPTER IV. 

paper of the man with one talent. 

After returning to God, in a clean napkin and a costly metal- 
lic case, a promising son, ruined by the credulous trust 
of the father in intimate churchly associations, sovereign 
grace, and periodical revivals 48 

(ix) 



X . TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 

All interview reciting his intelligent studies and methods in 
rearing five stalwart workers for humanity; that is, for 
God. — Tlie results outlined 78 

CHAPTER YI. 

PAPER OF DR. PRINCE, ALIAS " THE PERSIAN PRINCE." 

Thoroughly educated at home, he becomes a ph3'sician here. — 
Odd experience with current Christianity. — Learns its 
intrinsic excellence and heartily adopts it by exclusive 
study of the four Gospels.— Gives intelligent reasons, 
after forty years, for its superficial influence, the growth 
of "infidelity", the insignificant results of missionary 
efibrt 106 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE PIIOFESSOr's PAPER. 

Giving the club's educational, economic and moral work, in- 
cluding a system of education embracing all the life and 
its interests, assisted by special teachers and lecturers, 
employed by the county board of education to lecture, 
and conduct these studies, including, also, say sixteen 
well educated, well supported moral teachers, in a 
county of sixteen townships, with such "authority" as 
their good sense and spiritual masterfulness give them, 
in place of sixty-six sectarian "authorities", half edu- 
cated and half starved, to propagate apathy and " infi- 
delity " 136 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT AND BUSINESS MANAGER, NOW 
PRESIDENT OF THE CLUB. 

Individual and social interdependence on all the planes of 
life, as taught by Christ, by every-day experience, and 
by a true social science 175 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. XI 

CHAPTER IX. . • 

POEMS. 

The Awakening of Endymion. — Reconciling the World to 
Himself.— Where Shall We Find Hiin ?— A Primer of 
History. — The Helpmeet. — As IthersSee Us. — Suppose. — 
Character Builders. — Just Turned Eleven. — Toils for Ad- 
versity.— Chi valrie. — The Strange Host. — The Golden 
Age. — Spring and the Critics. — The American Autumn. 
—An Epic of the Period, the Civil W^ar.-Old Gloria. ... 202 



CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 



CHAPTER I. 

ORIGIN OF THE COUNTY CLUB. 

Its work defined. — Leads to the discussion of important social 
interests. — How the question of character-building soon drew, 
like a celestial maelstrom, all other interests toward it, and 
helped to organize into beneficent activities, hitherto chaos. 

Twelve young men and women had gone from our 
yillage and rural district to the best universities in 
the land. They had learned to handle the inven- 
tions of the day, been impressed with the efficiency 
of real powder stored in a thousand invisible, over- 
lapping universes of heat, light, electricity, ethers ; 
had seen what a wealth of beneficence works in God's 
warm breath, which, withering the flowers and thus 
exciting Nature's hunger and our own for divine 
help, brings millions of tons of vapor from the 
seas to be deposited, through the cunning touch of 
His cooler breath, on the parching sod. Through 
these wonderful demonstrations of active efficiency 
in the working of all created things, of kindly cun- 
ning eff'ort that sharp desire and thrilling sympathy 
of life and good should every-where prevail, they 
had worked their way back to the possibilities of 

(1) 



A CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

moral, that is of humane, forces, which the Creator 
at first planted in the hearts of men, and which he 
continues to nourish there, with constant purpose 
to rnake earth a paradise. 

They now contrasted the present efficiency of these 
physical forces with their only recent conditions, 
when water, coal, electricity slept, with all their 
teeming possibilities ; the last not kindly service- 
able, as now, but seemingly created to signal God's 
wrathful, vengeful disposition toward man, the high- 
est work of his hand. They saw how all these po- 
tential blessings had waited till ignorance and su- 
perstitions regarding them had died, and common 
sense and heaven-implanted wit had grappled with 
and "gained dominion" over them, and how they 
might have waited still if men had continued to 
grope in superstitions and ignorance. 

Coming back to their village and rural homes, 
they found the same intellectual and moral con- 
ditions which they had left five years ago. Five 
little church edifices waited through the week for 
the same insignificant fraction of the people. They 
saw leaders, some of them capable of being trained, 
or of training themselves, to do good work in awaken- 
ing the intellects and hearts of men to do good, but 
seemingly "called" and trained not for this moral, 
that is humane, that is divine work, but to support 
their families by holding their respective followings 
to their chosen forms of rival dogmas, by coddling 
partisan interest in these dogmas, or, at best, by 
painting the desirable qualities of a far-distant 



ORIGIN OF THE COUNTY CLUB. 3 

heaven to be gained, and the horrors of a far- 
distant burning brimstone hell to be shunned, in 
some supernatural way, by conformity to the re- 
quirements of these dogmas, many of them utterly 
irrelevant to or but remotely promotive of heavenly 
qualities and conditions, or of patriotism and hu- 
manity. 

And so they found the same persons, who five, 
ten, fifteen years ago were of responsible age and 
outside of the rival organizations severally assum- 
ing to possess the *' divine right" to call themselves 
the only true church of God, still outside of these 
rival organizations, with barely three exceptions, 
not counting a few children of church families from 
the Sunday schools. And yet five times fifteen 
years of pastoral, besides evangelistic work, had 
been expended at the bellows to keep alive coals 
enough to warm hearts enough to keep running 
the hour-a-week Sunday school and the weekly 
prayer meeting, that the organizations might not 
go stone dead as against weddings, christenings, 
funerals, and opportunities for political candidates 
to preside over delegate church conventions. They 
found the outsiders still contenting themselves with 
disbelieving that a system which bears no fruits 
was of any human account, and with doubting its 
assumed divine origin. 

Thus so dead in or to dogmas was the community 
that none believed what these people told them 
of green and fruitful places in the great centers of 
vice and ruin, and of humanity and godliness as 



4 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

well, where dogmas were ignored and with, force 
and arms forgotten, or relegated to the private 
study, as, long ago, by Spurgeon, and where, in- 
stead, God's work for humanity was being done 
with wonderful success, under the simple guidance 
of the supremely fertile truths of the four gospels. 

These young people, therefore, saw that but for 
some agency to awaken moral — humane — activities, 
their communities, like hundreds of thousands in 
the land, might still sleep for ages, as coal, elec- 
tricity had slept during the lethargy of intellect. 
They reasoned that efficient institutions can not be 
built of the knotholes — negatives — of outsiders any 
more than of irrelevant dogmas, and that ships at 
rest can not be steered into safe or profitable har- 
bors. And so they determined not to stop with 
criticising present conditions. They therefore com- 
bined to make known to distant moneyed commu- 
nities the economic advantages of their region ; its 
climate, the best in America, in thirty-four degrees 
north latitude, on an elevated plateau, between the 
mountains and the sea ; its soil of clay and sand, 
with its original stately oaks, hickories, poplars, 
black-walnuts, attesting its fertility ; its never- 
dying spring brooks and larger streams in con- 
venient distribution ; its abundant raw material, 
and its fuel and water-power inviting manufac- 
tures of all kinds. Through this information they 
brought capital, new life, enterprise, which begat 
new life and enterprise, so that capital was let 
loose by the sale of unused lands from each farm. 



ORIGIN OF THE COUNTY CLUB. O 

Thus manufactures and other industries were es- 
tablished, and live relations with the world. 

In five years the county had trebled its popula- 
tion and wealth, and the county seat had become an 
active, enterprising city, extending its stimulating 
and refining influence over the county, where the 
closer population had made good schools possible 
and the pleasures and refinements of a larger social 
life. 

"The farmer's club'* contained by this time nine 
hundred active members, representing all interests. 
It had its sections; "The House-wife's Section", 
for example, to discuss, with illustrations, the fine 
art housewifery in its relation to domestic happi- 
ness and civilization generally. 

To this section was also relegated the every where 
neglected, if not wholly undeveloped, art of child 
training, or character building. 

The interest which the active interchange of 
thought on this plane of domestic economy occa- 
sioned, had led to the employment in the county of 
a woman, trained by the new chair in one of the 
universities, whose recent, unclerical management 
had at length comprehended that every day life, its 
unmet necessities, its undeveloped possibilities, fur- 
nished a field for infinitely higher and more fruitful 
arts than the art of reading Greek and Latin, con- 
ceding to this last all that is claimed for it. The 
realm with which the first revelation of the Divine 
will concerned itself, as expressed in the command- 
ment, "Have Dominion", and whose relation to 



6 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

the supreme good of the race was fully recognized 
throughout scripture, and by the habit of Christ 
to feed, heal, comfort, on the earthly plane, before 
He tried to induce recognition of the Beatitudes 
offered by the higher plane, had waited, under the 
sacerdotal scheme of education, through stubbornly 
blind centuries for its proper rank among moral 
categories. 

In her lectures and papers, and in her systematic 
conversations and illustrative work at the homes, 
this woman had pointed out the way to a practical 
application of the principles of physiology and the 
related sciences of botany, chemistry, cookery, — the 
home arts generally, — as well as of the principles of 
psychology, to the peaceful enjoyment of bodily, in- 
tellectual and spiritual health and efficiency. 

This woman, a widow, thus undertook to pioneer 
a new field for the employment of the newly devel- 
oped art of living at home. She thus, meanwhile, 
materially aided in rendering club life in the country 
as fertile of good as it is becoming in the cities, to 
which it had been considered alone applicable. 

In a French work on *'The Art of Extempore 
Speaking", there is a remarkably lucid treatment 
of the power of disciplined mind to penetrate and 
analyze subjects which appear quite unyielding. In 
a large number of desperate cases it only requires a 
longing, hopeful, persevering search. Christ im- 
plies much of this. "Look unto me and solve the 
mystery of salvation." *'Ye will not come, — turn, 
— unto me that ye might have life," The club life, 



ORIGIN OF THE COUNTY^ CLUB. 7 

as conducted on its highest planes, awakens these 
most urgent incitements to master the great truths 
of life, from the study of which the doctors, quoting 
the Semitic rabbis as justification, have heretofore 
authoritatively excluded woman. 

Thus had been created a universal interest as to 
the best methods of realizing the Christly promises 
of life. This again led to an inquiry into the reasons 
for the historical unfruitfulness and uncertainty of 
any and all methods in general use for developing 
social perfection and individual character. 

This question came before the whole assembly 
at a "Basket Meeting" of the club, at a place called 
"The Neighborhood." And this? 

It happened that the corners of four farms met in 
a wooded reserve. The four owners had, under the 
new impulse, acquired the wit to forecast the econo- 
mic and social advantages of neighborhood, — recip- 
rocal interest, co-operation. They thinned the for- 
est, leaving the stately oaks and hickories and the 
beautiful young walnuts, and built new homes of 
varied architecture, each on his own neighboring 
corner. Transplanted cedars and willow-oaks, 
screened the picturesquely arranged out-buildings. 
At a little distance it had been found possible, at 
common expense, to dam a valley, forming a lake 
of twenty acres, for propagating fish and for 
the practice of boating and swimming. The force 
of the escaping water was easily applied to the 
generation of electric power for lighting, and to 
thresh, cut up fodder, grind provender, saw wood, 



8 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS.' 

churn, pump water into tanks to supply water in 
bath rooms, kitchens, fountains and barn lots, and 
for irrigating lawns and gardens. At "The Neigh- 
borhood", then, on the banks of this lake, the 
meetings of the club were often held. At these 
they had already discussed in detail, "the ad- 
vantages and conditions necessary to varied farm- 
ing ; the advantages of varied industries in relation 
to successful farming, and other economic ques- 
tions." 

The section of ' ' Household Economics ' ' had 
cleared its way toward the consideration of the 
"Science and Art of Character Building". Reach- 
ing the subject of "Moral, or Religious Training", 
the supposed conservatism of the older members, 
who were specially considered in all social events, 
and the sensitiveness of the sects represented 
among us, caused hesitation. Accordingly, when 
the interest could no longer be restrained, it was 
agreed that the eldest man of the club should open 
a discussion on the question : "What are the 
present relations of denominational organizations 
to the real interests of true religion, and especially 
to character building? Do they profess to present 
and do they present to us any adequate means of 
meeting this, the most manifestly urgent demand 
of the times?" 

The appointee first to speak is seventy-five years 
old, was for many years an active Sunday-school 
worker, and for sixty years a member of an orthodox 



ORIGIN OF THE COUNTY CLUB. 9 

church. The talks are to be reported verbatim and 
are preserved in this book. 

There are also culled from the files of the club 
several poems which have been read before it dur- 
ing the last two or three years, apparently tentative 
in their purpose and charging the imagination with 
the responsibility for conjectures along our lines of 
interest, which might lead to criticism if at once 
coldly uttered as fixed conclusions. Though put 
last they may be read first, by those who incline to 
read verse. The arguments are, however, in the 
main, to consist of the life long personal and social 
experiences and observations of the most intelli- 
gently practical members of the club. The pur- 
pose o*f the club is less to lead the world to adopt 
its proximate conclusions than to open the way to 
true and effective methods of securing the ultimate 
end in view. 



10 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 



CHAPTER II. 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 



The Situation: Economic, Social, Political, and Ecclesiastical, in 
America, outlined by the President. 

Added to all considerations of general thrift, or 
of social and philanthropic concern to men, the 
condition of freedom in America forces upon us 
questions which are absolutely vital. 

All the fathers of the Republic realized the trans- 
cendent value of freedom. They were not all mu- 
sicians nor philosophers, to appreciate the exacting 
prerequisites to harmony in art, and the still more 
exacting prerequisites to harmony in our social and 
political relations. What they did understand of 
them they believed that men would meet to the 
utmost and would instruct their children in them. 

We have had a century of experiences not all 
like those of the first years. We have had a war, 
most bloody and relentless, within the Republic. 
Even in a land so free as ours the seeds of anarchy 
have sprouted. A million copies of a single English 
work of the most socialistic character have been 
sold in America. 

Money is as yet a parvenue power among us. It 
remains to be seen how far the great blessings which 
America has derived from her vast accumulations 
may affect the treatment of its dangerous features. 
Fortunately, or unfortunately, in view of this doubt, 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 11 

some of our most alert citizens are am.ong our mon- 
eyed men. Some of these moneyed heroes, incited 
and directed by great patriotic thinkers, have caught 
on to the new problems and the method of their so- 
lution. They are establishing and liberally endow- 
ing schools, planned to build, not masters of arts 
nor of engineering alone, but men, able, in their 
turn, to organize forces protective of our national 
life, and constructive of an active, purposeful social 
system. 

Besides this, we yet see no reason why we should 
not be proud to compare our thousands of miles of 
railroads, for example, with the hundreds in other 
lands, and our cities of fifty years' growth with 
theirs of a millennium's growth. We feel our 
American hearts beat strongly and confidently 
when we see the boys who attended school with us 
at the road angle sixty, thirty years ago, already 
giving the American architect a carte blanche for 
the erection, in America, of the most elegant and 
luxurious homes on earth, the cost of which is 
often supplied from new contributions to the world 
by the inventive skill or creative power of their 
owners. 

But these luxuries and this whiz of railway trains 
and rush of steamers, even though they bear to the 
earless Mohammedans that gospel which has failed 
to charm the ear or touch the heart of the great 
masses in America, do not make it easier for the 
individual who lives on a crust to bear the burdens 
imposed on his strictly hand to mouth method of liv- 



12 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS, 

ing, from the exactions of thoughtless monopolies, 
or the cunning and often far-reaching policies of 
millionaire bulls, bears, and legislators. They do 
not palliate, in the interests of humanity, the alien- 
ation of the masses of our people from those influ- 
ences of religion which are assumed to be essential 
conditions of safety to society, and of available good 
to the individual, and from which wealth, even 
churchly wealth, excludes rather than invites these 
masses. They do not secure to these toiling, un- 
considered masses that knowledge and discipline 
which enable them to distinguish between liberty 
and license, nor the conditions precedent to the suc- 
cess of free institutions. They do not guarantee 
society from the influence of those sophistries 
glossed with truth, which create widespread aliena- 
tion, even brutal enmity, between the apparently 
rich and the poor in our compact communities, nor 
lead the privileged classes to consider generally and 
studiously, possible ameliorations for these condi- 
tions. They do not lessen the significance of com- 
plaints in every religious paper and in all the 
printed appeals of evangelists, like Mr. Moody, of 
the alarming increase of "infidelity" among intel- 
ligent people, an increase far surpassing the esti- 
mates of sectarian authorities, and suggesting 
French attitudes toward religion in America. 

It would be eminently pleasing to approach the 
topic of the hour, "the relation of the present de- 
nominational organizations to character building", 
with no other purpose but to embellish it with 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 13 

encomiums. The history of the Christian church 
has been of the history of inspired humanity, and it 
has brilliant chapters. It has also been of the his- 
tory of a grotesque inhumanity, and it has fur- 
nished still unused material for tragic literature, the 
most thrilling of all, since its agents have borne 
great names, and its victims were often heroes of 
high thought and purpose ; nations, generations ; 
more tragic still, ideals, prophecies Qf good, cher- 
ished hopes. And does not its present, too, mani- 
festly represent the tendency of large organizations 
to take on the fashions of the ages they traverse 
and to protrude these shapes of thought into periods 
to which they are incongruous, alienating, even 
absurd ? 

How to rule the masses and to live by them was 
the problem of the hiero-monarchical periods. For 
this, "authority" was the only indispensable requi- 
site. As in the sensuous stages of Jewish life, the 
pillar of fire and the cloud, the brazen serpent, the 
expression of worshipful sentiment by sacrifices, 
served a temporary purpose, so, perhaps, in later 
periods of transition from pagan forms and ideas, 
these forms of authoritative assumption may have 
had their use. Conversion then meant the adop- 
tion of a new creed. This adhesion secured, obedi- 
ence to the official representatives of that creed 
followed. Beyond this the church pressed its exac- 
tions only along certain lines of prescribed conduct. 
These were rather as signs of the activity of their 
faith in, and of their obedience to, the church than 



14 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS „ 

as evidences of their morality ; since character alone 
sustained no relation to salvation. The church's 
obligation to the individual consisted in securing 
him a passport to, not necessarily fitness for, a dis- 
tant heaven. This was 'its lure to membership. 
Nor were these masses looked to to furnish the ma- 
terial for building the state. Without votes they 
had little political influence, except as mere muscle 
in the ranks of leaders, where it made no difference 
what their own opinions might be. 

Diametrically unlike the Old and the New Testa- 
ment schemes, social claims were little thought of. 
Individuals and their temporal or social interests 
were unregarded. Character was a side issue or 
was left unconsidered, by the church. Any sugges- 
tions of reason or conscience regarding it were met 
by Art. XI: *'We are accounted righteous before 
God, only for the merits of our Lord and Savior, 
. we are justified by faith only". A life 
absolutely fruitless was thus counted for as much as 
the full and true life painted by Christ, and by the 
Old Testament scheme for fostering patriotism, 
family affection, reverence and love for God, for 
truth, and for all good. 

What is of interest to us and to the world in this mat- 
ter, and gives us the right to inquire into it, is the fact 
that the present church *' authority" has not only 
taken the liberty to defend and continue all this, but 
has not hesitated to monopolize the whole field of 
moral effort. It has enabled itself to do this in less 
enlightened and more credulous ages, by its "authori- 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 15 

tative" princely offers of a heaven and hell, both so 
distant as to dispose of all questions concerning its 
guaranty. Under various forms of tenure it still 
assumes to hold the keys of heaven. As, for ex- 
ample, it teaches that "works not of faith in Jesus 
Christ, are not pleasing to God", and faith in Jesus 
Christ, is secured by conversion under the aus- 
pices of the church and only evidenced by union 
with it. Was he or not, a "professor"? This 
settles his case at death, to-day. And so, credulous 
people, to whom it is so easy not to think, have 
been made to chant that, though men were created 
in the image of God, and though the existence of 
society has depended upon the possession by men 
of such moral attributes as may be nursed by her 
skillful care, and watered by the ever abounding 
grace of God into vigorous life, there is really no 
inherent equity in judge nor righteousness in jury ; 
no patriotism in armies, nor valor of it ; no virtue 
in woman no fidelity in man, nor sense of the 
value and excellence of these. 

The youth who "has not made a profession", but 
who jumps from his cab to the cow-catcher to save 
a child he has never heard of, and to fill with heaven 
the heart of a mother he has never seen, is a fiend 
that "hath no power to do a good deed", and no 
aspiration ; a soul, wherein God has sown only "the 
corruption of a sinful nature". 

And yet these people have believed that the same 
God who forgets to send His grace, like sun and 
rain, to constantly develop into perfection the 



16 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

image of Himself which He planted at the first in 
man, and which, despite neglect and the rebuffs it 
suffers at the hands of dogmatism, often gives such 
evidence of vitality, will, at the dictate of a creed, 
instantaneously change a real fiend, become such 
by fiendish methods of life, into a spotless saint. 
While, to transform a raw, properly endowed man 
into a musician, or an artist, requires years of train- 
ing and work, the artificial sacerdotal system, asks 
us to honor its pretensions, that a fiend of the 
morning may become the recognizable saint of the 
evening. It demands that society, the state, shall 
accept this instantaneous, this often unrecognizable 
differentiation, to which its work, so far as there 
has been work, was but incidental and not causa- 
tive, as an equivalent for its exactions upon both. 
While other professions expect nothing except for 
a claim which is founded on an appreciable contri- 
bution to some use and service, the servants of the 
Church presume to found their claims to special 
reverence on the sacredness of their ofiice, the in- 
trinsic dignity of the cause they assume to represent. 

As to the stranded sectaries, the hardshells and 
their kind, their only objective purpose is their 
personal salvation, a matter of as little concern to 
society as social interests are to these selfish ere- 
mites. Is their pride in the garbs and customs of 
two hundred years ago more Christ-like than pride 
in those of to-day? 

For the rest, it is certainly fair to quote directly 
their own literature to show the present condition 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 17 

and capability of the still living organizations to 
carry on what society now reasonably regards as 
essential to its life and to the maintenance of God's 
kingdom upon earth ; the building of human char- 
acter. 

Recent reports of General Assemblies show that 
"in 1895 three thousand American Congregational 
and Presbyterian churches received no additions to 
their membership" ; it being true, also, that they 
have come to expect the bulk of these additions 
through their Sabbath schools. Since this, the re- 
port of Gen. Howard, as chairman of the American 
Missionary Society, declares that "while contribu- 
tions to the relief of sufferers by storm and flood 
were never so abundant, the contributions to this 
department of church work have greatly dimin- 
ished". 

I have before me the annual sermon, preached by 
Dr. Sheldon Jackson, before the recent General As- 
sembly of the Presbyteran Church. It celebrates 
the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary from the 
adoption of the Westminster Catechism as their 
standard of faith. Accordingly, and perhaps sig- 
nificantly, omitting mention of the New Testament 
as one of the sources of their doctrines, the Doctor 
takes great satisfaction in founding the church on 
Zwingli (1484 to 1531), on Calvin, Knox, Wyck- 
liffe, Jonathan Edwards, and St. Patrick. He then 
glories in the fact that a list of "presidents, vice- 
presidents and judges have belonged to our organi- 



18 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

zation, thus emphazing the tendency of our doc- 
trines to make brainy men". 

But he forgets to note that the figure which the 
wealth of such organizations enables them to cut in 
music, art, and other social devices, may account 
for a large part of their numerical reckoning, and 
for its respectability. This jeremiad follows in the 
sermon : 

*'Thus the boards, the machinery through which 
the church works, are in splendid order — fully 
equipped and competent to conquer this land and 
the world for Christ, but they are not doing it. 
Not only is the church not advancing all along the 
line, but it is not even holding its own. In places it 
is retreating. Needed re-enforcements are not fur- 
nished. Men and women set apart by the Holy 
Ghost can not be sent forward for want of funds. 
Missionaries have been compelled to fall back for 
want of supplies. Churches have been closed. 
Young converts have been remanded back to hea- 
thanism. Native catechists have been turned 
adrift. Children of the church in newer settle- 
ments, denied gospel privileges, are making ship- 
wreck of their souls. New and growing centers of 
influence, left without the molding and restraining 
influences of the gospel and a 'remembered sab- 
bath', are laying the foundations of socialism and 
anarchy. . . . The church, through her boards, 
is in debt, and the cry of 'deferred payments' and 
'reduced salaries' is heard. The cries of your chil- 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 19 

dren goiug down to destruction are heard all over 
the land" 

And yet the learned pastor of the fashionable 
New York Avenue church, in Washington, steps 
forward, as the newly elected moderator of the As- 
sembly, to announce, "I can quite understand that 
you welcome [in my election] an opportunity to 
recognize and to emphasize, in these times and 
under these peculiar circumstances, to the capital 
and to the nation, the dependence of the government 
on this church which we represent and which we 
love. We make the large aim, propagation of the 
gospel". 

Somewhere among the mountains I have seen a 
pellucid lake into which pours a respectable stream, 
some thirty feet sheer. As the fall strikes the sur- 
face it and the surface are broken into fine spray, 
and with such violence that, supposing the beauti- 
ful white fragments conscious, they can not be made 
to understand that this agitation leaves nine hun- 
dred and ninety-nine one-thousandths of this pool 
as quiet as a painted ocean. A few square feet 
only of the surface is affected, and of the depths 
below almost literally none. From the bottom, 
sixty feet below, to within five feet of the top of the 
water fishes can be seen swimming, so still is it. 
On both the material and the intellectual planes we 
are laddering our ideas of force to giddy heights. 
Hence, we are, perhaps, justifying ourselves in ex- 
pecting much from those spiritual forces which 
Christ declared to be eternally and supremely effi- 



20 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

cient, even to the removing of mountains. We are 
also led to depreciate the indispensableness of me- 
dieval devices for this age. 

Meanwhile, Zwingli's answer to the charge of 
being a follower of Luther, is a stoning rebuke to 
Dr. Jackson's claims: *'I am not a follower of 
Luther. Why should I follow Luther? I know 
the Greek New Testament as well as he knows it". 
At his death, in 1531, he left nothing to show that, 
in 1648, he would subscribe, for all time, to the 
Westminster Catechism. From his higher outlook, 
the New Testament, he would have guessed out the 
conditions that must result from such a course in a 
more enlightened age. He could then, perhaps, 
have written the above melancholy facts, and, it 
may be, the article which recently appeared in one 
of the leading magazines, referring to "Over one 
hundred objectionable church entertainrpents to 
raise money, during the year 1896, including ankle 
shows". 

The above illustration from the mountain scene 
could not, it appears to me, picture the pitiful ef- 
fects of occasional religious efforts now sometimes 
made by strong men, but for the proverbially shallow 
convictions which characterize the common churchly 
mind, resulting from the centuries-long habit of 
relegating all moral concerns to the region of 
"faith", the present popular conception of which is 
so aptly hit by a noted humorist, "belief in what 
you know is not true". To an age of enlightment 
through reason, an age of quick and earnest appre- 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 21 

ciation of the essential relation of cause and effect, 
a system which in any measure loosens this relation 
can not sustain an efficient affiliation. 

. The intelligent mind of to-day is not deprecat- 
ing the influence of these schemes as evidenced in 
the occasional prosecution of a brother who flinches 
in accepting them, so much as for the fixed condi- 
tions of superficial and infertile thought on sub- 
jects of the deepest importance to society, which 
these schemes have established throughout the 
civilized world. This incapacity of the religious 
class to be moved by moral, humane considerations 
sufficiently to unite in laying aside unimportant, 
traditional differences, for the accomplishment of 
good, is a paralysis on their denominational work, 
not only, but on other more important interests. 
Arnold White tells us that on this account, in Eng- 
land, a new Savonarola only can arouse the popular 
consciousness. It goes so far as to deprive our 
public systems of education of all privilege of 
direct effort to build moral character, on account of 
the noli me tangere condition of mind it has estab- 
lished among the sects. 

If we are to be told that the maintenance of these 
rival divisions is necessary to the maintenance of 
religion, then either religion itself or its agency will 
continue by so far to be regarded as a failure. If 
the present "defenders of the faith" can not make 
religion appear to be as important to the human 
race as science is, about whose support there is no 
question, a reasonable people will continue to play 



22 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

the role of "infidelity", in a ratio still greater than 
now. But let us look at another presentation of 
the long waited for "fruits of the spirit", as ripened 
under this sacerdotal scheme. The picture is drawn 
in one of the weekly printed sermons of a noted 
preacher. 

"I pass to speak of ecclesiastical lies which are 
told for the advancement or retarding of a church 
or sect. It is hardly worth your while to ask an 
extreme Calvinist what an Armenian believes. He 
will tell you that an Armenian believes that a man 
can save himself. To ask an extreme Armenian 
what a Calvinist believes, he will tell you that a 
Calvinist believes that God made some men just to 
damn them. To ask a Pedo'-Baptist, a Baptist, a 
Presbyterian, like questions, as like falsehoods will 
follow. 

"Then how often it is that there are misrepresen- 
tations on the part of individual churches in regard 
to other churches, especially if a church comes to 
great prosperity. And, if a church is in poverty, 
so that the pastor goes with his elbows out, 
Christian people in churches say, 'What a pity ! 
What a pity' ! But let prosperity come to a 
church, let the music be triumphant, and the as- 
semblages large, then there will be even ministers 
of the gospel full of misrepresentation and falsifi- 
cation, giving the impression to the outside world 
that they do not like the corn because it is not 
ground in their mill". 

But for commitments like these, I should have 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 23 

continued to hesitate to insert this paragraph, which 
I had prepared, that while there are legions of good 
and true people belonging to the churches, what 
committee seeking a responsible person for a re- 
sponsible place, w^ould attach the least importance 
to the fact that he had a certificate of church mem- 
bership, or had not? Or what father would feel 
any confidence that his son, placed in the most in- 
timate relations to church influences as such, would 
become a true Christian or a reliable character? 

And this sign of the unfruitfulness of the sacer- 
dotal scheme has protruded itself into a generation 
which has established on the native yearning of the 
race for individual freedom from the fetters of * 'di- 
vine right" rule, a secular government, which, in a 
hundred years, has reached the van of human gov- 
ernments. The one high purpose, to be free, so 
manipulated as to unite, even crudely, the interests 
of an alert age, has accomplished so much. What 
will not the united interests of such an age achieve 
when a higher purpose, which includes this and all 
other worthy purposes, that of building character 
for individual, social, patriotic, and all higher good, 
shall be so manipulated as to engage the interest of 
that age to its full efi'ectiveness ? We submit that 
the failure of the rival sacerdotally multiplied 
bodies to effect this united interest, furnishes no 
reason to believe that it can not be done — counting 
God's ever manifest, active, and earnest interest in 
the subject. 



24 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Thanking the learned doctors for furnishing me 
ready printed much in the way of specification and 
argument, through their own experiences and ob- 
servations, which are also mine, on the question 
before us: "What are the present denominational 
organizations doing in the way of meeting the de- 
mands of the age toward building characters", I 
give place to our veteran friend, who needs no in- 
troduction here. 



THE veteran's PAPER 25 



CHAPTER III. 



THE veteran's PAPER. 



Sectarian religion. — Its fruits in the family and neighborhood. — 
Results from its multiplied church organizations in rural dis- 
tricts, villages, and small cities. — Consequent apathy and 
infidelity, despair, suicide, self-abandon. 

My personal observation and experience are to be 
my argument. They shall be given for the service 
of society, without any exaggeration and with mal- 
ice toward neither persons nor institutions. 

An orphan at six years of age, at fourteen the 
writer left an enterprising uncle's house, in the 
State of New York, where his very cleverness at 
errands and simple items of business promised to 
continually preclude his attendance on even a com- 
mon village school. In addition to the opportunity 
of free air, and the never sufficiently appreciated 
blessing of systematic employment among interests 
widely diversified, and with such a variety of ani- 
mals as gave constant occasion to test his strength 
and ingenuity, the one valued privilege of his 
childhood was the unstinted opportunity to commit 
an unlimited number of scripture verses — the gos- 
pels and other religious texts — and to read repeat- 
edly the biographical stories of the Bible. The 
faculty of memory was thus exercised, the imagina- 
tion awakened, and a modicum of intellectual and 



26 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

moral furniture secured, without which I have ever 
since judged that a young man must enter life but 
half equipped. The opportunity for this furnish- 
ment in kind is not likely to recur in after life. 

While my uncle never happened to interest him- 
self in the scripture lessons, an older sister living 
in the same family being my guardian angel in this 
regard, he and the other deacons and the elders of 
the church took a special pride in having every 
member of the family recite glibly the Westminster 
Catechism. They were also especially proud to re- 
port that none of the forms of social amusement 
were permitted to enter their homes, though the 
corrupting influence of the outdoor and indoor help 
escaped notice. They seemed to attach special sig- 
nificance to the importance which this interest in 
the "Standards and Prescribed Practices of the 
Church" gave them. As we children grew a little 
older, and but a little, we seemed to read between 
the lines that, great and important as Christ's part 
in the plan of salvation might be, He never could 
have succeeded in saving even His elect, had not 
the Westminster Catechism and the Thirty-nine 
Articles come to His relief. We were not then able 
to see what Phillips Brooks has since declared, that 
this supreme dogmatical sentimentality, instead of 
emphasizing profound fidelity to true religion, 
might be taken as the clearest evidence of rank in- 
fidelity as to the benevolent intentions of God in 
the creation of moral beings, and as to the relation 
of scripture and of Christ to the real work of salva- 



THE veteran's PAPER. 27 

tion. Their confidence in the arbitrary "system of 
faith" was such that, having armed their children 
with the "training" which the memorizing of its lit- 
erature gave, they trusted the rest to the spirit of God, 
when the sovereign will of God should deign to send 
it. Should it not be sent, the question of character 
was irrelevant, or rather, presumptuous, as a basis 
of religious consideration. Twice only in the seven 
years of my stay with him, did my uncle ever 
broach the subject of personal religion, personal 
habits, or personal character to me. Once it was 
in answer to a request that I might go to a Protest- 
ant Methodist church at the village a mile away, to 
hear a woman preach. "Your father was a Pres- 
byterian, and while I am responsible for your re- 
ligious training you must attend that church". He 
also made very clear to me the distinctive character 
of the two faiths. 

Against his refusal, however, I heard the woman. 
. There was a wheat field, of many stumps, 
at a distance from the house. Some of these stumps 
I made it convenient to see walking, as my license 
for hastening to drive cattle off the wheat. As I 
did not hasten back, the carriage was seen to start 
to "our church", three miles beyond our village, 
without me. The ruse left me half way to the vil- 
lage, and I was in time to get my first picture of a 
religion relieved by a highlight and permeated by 
human sympathy. After this I more than once 
rused my way to a Methodist evening prayer-meet- 
ing, solely to enjoy the resonant richness of a voice 



28 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

full of motherly sympathy. I remember that for a 
long tinie I failed to regard this as a religious exer- 
cise, since it never included the petition invariably 
characterizing the morning prayer at home and at 
church, for "the return of God's people, — the Jews, 
— to Jerusalem", nor the grateful acknowledgment 
that "through Thy sovereign grace some of us have 
been plucked as brands from deserved burnings". 

But I still feel something of the joy of human 
sympathy then first suggested to me in connection 
with church influences. I also remember to have 
counted as of little value the shouting and noise which 
] heard in these meetings, since to me it had no ap- 
parent cause. I even then associated that with the 
effort at home to start the cistern pump, whose worn 
valve had let out the water since it was last used, 
and which must be worked many times before the 
air which had crept into the vacuum could be suffi- 
ciently exhausted to allow the water to rise. 

The village was rather a rough one, with much 
drinking and notable fighting. It was before the 
Washingtonian temperance movement had made 
much way, and I daily saw evidence that it had not 
yet reached this church membership. 

All these things gave a mischievous boy much 
food for a great variety of thoughts. My uncle had, 
in the conversation above referred to, solemnly as- 
sured me that these Methodists denied the cardinal 
doctrines of the gospels. "They neither believe in 
election nor saint's perseverance, without which I 
should have little to comfort me on earth". These 



THE veteran's PAPER. 29 

words created a hell of tumult and doubt within me. 
Would God take the trouble to look up and elect a 
waif like me, or could such a hummingbird of versa- 
tility ever get religion enough to persevere in any- 
thing? 

One day when deacon number two and my uncle 
were catechizing the family in turn, under a recent 
resolution of the church, I saw from the window 
Harley Stone lying on the ground with one foot in 
the stirrup and under a notably vicious horse. I 
told the deacons. Neither of them stirred to help 
the fallen man. But I heard, as I crossed the room 
to the door, the words, "Here is an instance in point 
of how dangerous it is to reject religion and live in 
sin". • I heard no more, but extracted Harley from 
the horse now frantic. Two hours afterwards 
Harley awoke from his debauch. "Who put me 
here?" said he, "I did". "Who put my horse in 
the stable?" "I did". "Ben, I love you, I have 
always loved you. I sometimes see you in the vil- 
lage with and ", naming the two sons of 

deacon number three of "our" church. "H. drinks 
badly. Promise me, Ben, that you will never go 
with him. I can not bear to see you get to be a 
drunkard. I shall never stop being one". 

This unexpected and unaccustomed sympathy 
broke my heart. To his further persuasion I tear- 
fully and solemnly promised that I would never 
touch intoxicating liquors. He gave my hands a 
firmer grasp with both his, and with tears gushing 
from his eyes, murmured "thank God for that". A 



30 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

soul had been redeemed out from one evil, at least, 
by a sympathy and affection which I have ever since 
regarded as among the purest gems I know, though 
gems in a slime which must and which did eventu- 
ally destroy them. Subsequent experiences suggest 
what might have been done to save this man by 
men in the advantageous position of the deacons, 
had they been less accustomed to wait for sovereign 
grace to work for them, or had their own sense of 
responsibility been less stupefied by this custom. 

I did not return to the class, and for a year the 
word religion provoked from me only profanity. My 
sister had married, and I saw little of her. Those 
religious instincts were still alive and active, how- 
ever, which constitute the image and likeness of 
God in men, without which men were but brutes, 
and the God who made them social, responsible 
beings without them were a monster for which no 
secular language has a name. These instincts 
struggled against the horrid images which these 
environments pictured to my active but tender im- 
agination, and which haunted me from the pages of 
Jonathan Edwards, a book I continued to read, as I 
would read any other tragic literature. I was not 
permitted to read Shakespeare. 

It is proper here to express my gratitude that 
while religious questions were never discussed in 
the presence of the deacons, some of the '^help" 
were active minded persons. Indeed, one of them 
became a leading politican of the West, and another 
a multi-millionaire in the lumber business. These 



THE veteran's PAPER. 31 

discussed religious questions freely. When Dr. 
Beman of Albany was in straits for teaching that 
the blood of Christ was not shed to make God will- 
ing to forgive, but rather to make it consistent with 
the demands of a violated law, these not only sided 
with the Doctor but went much further in the dis- 
cussion of the whole scheme. I thus saw straws in- 
dicating either that there was a better truth, or that 
the whole fabric was false and that I had nothing to 
fear from its terrors. 

It is impossible to tell what would have resulted 
from this strife had not the Washingtonian temper- 
ance movement created a temporary but absorbing 
diversion. Gerrit Smith, a gentleman reputed to 
have the then exceptional income of fifty thousand 
dollars a year, and who possessed a fine figure and 
address, clad, as he was, in a blue dress coat, with 
brass buttons, in a buff vest, a wide turn-down 
collar, and all else in keeping, was really the ideal, 
if not the idol of all who knew him. It was said 
that no poor man within the large neighborhood 
circle of his acquaintance ever lacked a turkey for 
his thanksgiving dinner, and that no widow left in 
his county to support a family by her own work, 
began the new year without a money donation of at 
least fifty dollars. 

As he was accustomed to address his neighbors at 
any country school-house, village or city, on temper- 
ance and other subjects of human interest, I had 
not a few opportunities to hear him. He was all 
the more my hero in my then state of mind, that he 



32 CHAKACTER NOT CREEDS. 

excited the inimical but always covert opposition of 
the political and church leaders, by his larger and 
freer mold of thought, and by his bolder advocacy 
of human interests as above institutions and "tra- 
ditions of men". These leaders, not perceiving the 
true forces which gave their institutions their reason 
to live, feared for the existence of these fabrics 
under his habit of setting their purpose above their 
mere forms. 

He married a Virginia lady, as we were told, and 
had freed her slaves. He anticipated Horace Greeley 
and Wm. H. Seward in basing his opposition to 
slavery less on sympathy for the slaves than on the 
manifest effect of slavery and its incidents in dwarf- 
ing or corrupting the reasoning powers of men, 
their consciences, and their lives, and thus in turn- 
ing out of the upward-leading paths of life all 
concerned with it. 

In advocating universal education, and trying to 
incite a personsal interest in it among his neighbors, 
he dwelt on the wisdom of Heaven in so adjusting 
the economies of life as to make our very effort to 
secure coveted material good conducive to mental 
and moral development. The higher successes in 
life were also made to depend on the exercise and 
development of our highest faculties. Hence neither 
a slave nor the mian who lives, without personal 
effort, on the earnings of a slave, can ever attain to 
inventive power, or can possess the incentives con- 
ducive to the development of high practical activi- 
ties or qualities. Freedom to clutch, and the neces- 



THE veteran's PAPER. 33 

sity to exert our powers to clutch personal interests 
can alone promote educated communities. The 
effort to secure personal culture in the absence of 
general culture is also bound to fail, for several 
radical reasons. It is a good natured arrangement 
of providence and a necessary one, exemplifying a 
principle in God's kindly dealings with men, that 
the country choir, which can not be a city choir, 
can be happy and even proud, in its superiority to 
a neighboring choir, though its own voices are 
really as stridulous and uncouth as those of a choir 
of crickets and bull-frogs. They are satisfied, be- 
cause the neighborhood are satisfied, and there 
naturally ends their effort toward culture. 

The means of culture also which any one family 
can secure are always trifling compared with what 
a culture-seeking community can secure. The ex- 
ploitation of personal knowledge, its intermingling, 
and application to reciprocal purposes, are essential 
to its efl'ect in securing personal perfections. Hence 
the interest each has in the culture of others. It 
was, indeed, intended, foreordained, if you please, 
that men should be social, interdependent beings, 
and only perfect and happy in proportion to the 
activity and dominance of this social interest. 

To this gentleman life and all which pertained to 
it had a present, earthly purpose and value as well 
as, and even more emphatic in its relations to our 
families and neighbors, than its distant purpose. 
Through these purposes lay the only road to manly 
development for this life or the next. 



34 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

I was long enough under the influence of these 
thoughts before, at fourteen, I left my uncle to 
struggle alone for an education, to become con- 
vinced that religion had a higher substance and use 
than I had been led to attach to it. Instead of ap- 
pearing to me now like a charm or incantation, dis- 
covered by Calvin, Luther, Wesley, or Edwards, 
and into which men were only to be initiated by a 
bewilderingly uncertain and supernatural process, 
called conversion, even more bewilderingly uncer- 
tain in its effect on the life, as it had pictured itself 
to me through the teaching I had received, I dimly 
perceived that it was the atmosphere into which 
as moral and social beings we were born, just as 
we w^ere born to the nourishing mother-milk, the 
life-sustaining air, the refreshing and cleansing 
water, the beauties of the landscape, to all the 
large material interests through which we grow in 
bodily and intellectual stature and strength. These 
views seemed on the other side of a great chasm to 
me from the mere emotional and indefinite im.- 
plications of the pulpit. 

The logical deduction which Hosea Ballou had 
drawn from orthodoxy, that if the certain few could 
risk their salvation on the notion that the law of cause 
and effect is to be abrogated in their case by the 
higher and arbitrary will of God, then the rest of 
mankind might trust their salvation to the same 
notion a little enlarged, I had adopted' for want of 
better leading. Many of the Universalists were led 
to 'accept this broader, higher view of God's love 



THE veteran's PAPER. 35 

from the warm and generous impulses of their own 
natures. Ostracised as "infidels" on account of 
their rejection of the denominational tenets of the 
day, their sympathies were all the more warm and 
demonstrative toward each other. Thus the atmo- 
sphere of their homes was so genial, frank, and un- 
stilted as to render them exceedingly attractive by 
comparison with the more sanctimonious and cen- 
sorious air of the homes I had known. These views 
had rendered nugatory to me the mere pathos 
relied on by the pulpit. Its trembling elocution 
had no effect on me. Under the influence of the 
newer thought, only the germs of which had en- 
tered my mind, as I now see, I began to observe 
the impossibility of separating this law of cause 
and effect from moral being any more than from 
material being. Effects can only be avoided when 
causes cease, and I early conceived the office of re- 
ligion to be to help us to obviate the causes of evil. 
I vaguely regarded God's grace as I regarded the 
sunshine and rain, in its relation to nature as a 
part of every man's capacity at any point in his 
career to "turn and live". 

I have in the West, and even in Atlanta, met 
with the pamphlets which contained the subsequent 
manly assertions by Mr. S. that religions must be 
judged by their fruits, their efficiency in making 
men good, true to the great purposes of individual 
and social life, and not by their beautiful conform- 
ity to syllogistic deductions from traditional "Thus 
saith the Lords". He saw in the very incipiency 



36 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

of the progress which has since filled the Christian 
world with "infidels", that the scientific beauty of 
the syllogism might blind the eyes to the nature of 
the premise, its historic verity, or its historic rele- 
vancy to the subject in hand. These pamphlets, 
containing, as they did, the answers to men zealous 
for the prevailing forms of thought, were especially 
valued by those who had been neighbors of their 
author. I know of many cases in which men who 
had been alienated from the old forms of thought, 
were thus led to retain their connection with reli- 
gious organizations, in the hope that the better 
views would at length commend themselves to the 
religiously inclined. 

Referring again more immediately to my own ex- 
periences, my sister seeing her opportunity in the 
impressions these newer thoughts had made on me, 
persuaded me to join the church. 

For the five sons of the three deacons, the con- 
stant and perplexing reminders of the eternal con- 
sequences of mistake in regard to the historic doc- 
trines, or of failure to secure connection with the 
strangely unsympathetic and mechanical, and yet 
peremptory scheme of salvation, and the utter ab- 
sence of humane effort to lead them into this rela- 
tion resulted as might have been expected. For I 
know that neither deacon one nor three ever seemed 
to think it necessary to supplement the catechetical 
teaching with a show of personal interest in the sal- 
vation of the boys. These saw their salvation to de- 
pend, in some undefined degree, on a form of bap- 



THE veteran's PAPER. 37 

tism, for example. But this question was solely an 
historic one, and was involved in such obscurity 
that the jury has never been brought to agree on it. 

The truth of other far more weighty doctrines was 
based solely on the authority of Paul. But his value 
as an authority was dependent on the decision of un- 
inspired councils that Paul was a teacher inspired 
with an infallible knowledge of Christ's thoughts 
to their last shade of meaning. This was a dis- 
puted point, even in the councils. These and a 
thousand other questions involved in the almost ex- 
clusively historic scherae of salvation, perplexed and 
entangled the minds of these young men. Only one 
of them, inheriting as his chief characteristic the 
conservative tendencies of the circle in which he 
moved, continued his connection with the orthodox 
system. One, despairing of help from it out of condi- 
tions from which even his close relationship to the 
best churchly influences known to the times had not 
secured him, committed suicide in early manhood. 
Another gave himself up without much struggle, 
and died in delirium tremens, at thirty or so. Two 
of them, one a strong intellect and a leader, have 
figured notably, all their mature lives, in a society 
antagonistic to all forms of orthodoxy. All these are 
facts which can be authenticated, and they are not 
so rare as to startle intelligent people by their 
strangeness. 

Other members of the families of this church 
died early of dissipation. Of those which I have 
met in the West and South, the chances are largely 



38 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

in favor of their being reckoned among the * 'infi- 
dels" of this latter day. 

These /ac^.9, when put on paper, are so startling, 
even to me, that I am constrained to protest again 
that they are not set forth with a disposition to 
criticise persons or bodies of people, but solely to 
induce thought along the most important lines of 
our individual, domestic, and social life. 

That these men meant well I have no doubt. But 
they too sincerely believed their doctrines which 
led them into utterly fruitless lives. 

It would have been far more pleasing to me to 
trace in this paper the evidences of the inherent 
qualities of our race for good, by showing the so 
largely successful efforts of portions of them to 
travel along the lines of use and beauty which now 
separate the hut, with its savage concomitants, from 
the comfortable homes, filled with the products of 
human art and invention ; to show how it has been 
possible for them, in spite of professional disparage- 
ment, to avail themselves of the activities of the 
past in secular paths, without binding themselves 
to its clumsy wheels, and to educe from experience 
and scientific reasoning, and to use for practical 
purposes, the principles on which God has always 
worked and now works in the material universe ; to 
show how in the department of thought which 
deals with men's relations to each other, men have 
been able to leave behind the charms and enchant- 
ments, and the other unreasoning characteristics of 
the old systems of law, and have evolved from year 



THE veteran's paper. 39 

to year juster and more efFective systems of juris- 
prudence, founded on the nature of man and the 
better and better understood relations of men and 
especially of women to each other, to the social body 
and the body politic ; and thus to hint how, in spite of 
professional disparagements of human nature, there 
are deeper moral potentialities in the race, always 
counting God's manifest interest in it, than we 
have been taught or permitted to believe. I must 
leave this more pleasant task to others, and hasten 
to my recital. 

Leaving out in advance, two years of church 
membership in the village of Vernon, near which I 
then lived with my sister on a farm, attending the 
Presbyterian church and communion regularly, with- 
out either of us becoming acquainted with a single 
member of that rather representative aristocratic 
chureh, or receiving one word of Christian sym- 
pathy or fraternal recognition, although we dressed 
reasonablly well and drove a good team, albeit in a 
farm wagon, and were neither judges nor presi- 
dents. Under these circumstances I can not lay 
claim to a high degree of piety, my sister's influ- 
ence alone sufficing to keep me from another revolt, 
and perhaps from entire perdition. 

Of a susceptible nature, I had previously to this 
more than once given a dollar at a time out of 
scanty wages, to assist home m.issions to build 
churches on the "destitute Western Reserve," in 
Ohio, whither some of my friends had removed. 
After the two years referred to, I followed these 



40 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

contributions to that state, where I found them 
building a Presbyterian church edifice at the "cen- 
ter" of a township of three hundred voters, where 
there was an energetic Congregational church, with 
a comfortable house, a M. E. church, with a good 
house, and a Free-will Baptist church, then build- 
ing. Any two of these houses would have accom- 
modated all the inhabitants of this township, and 
many more. 

There being no Presbyterian church, the funds 
gathered in New York built one superior to the 
others. This divided and crippled the Congrega- 
tional church ; the two thereafter taking turns in 
periods of suspended animation, though the Presby- 
terians received from the H. M. fund each year as 
much money as all the township gave to mission 
work. I knew the township for thirty-five years, 
and out of the six hundred voters finally reached, 
sixty voters was more than the average attendance 
of voters on all the churches. 

In a neighboring township, with four hundred 
voters in the forties, since reaching six hundred, 
there were five churches, in each of which the 
pastors received from one hundred to two hundred 
dollars. They were obliged to work at one thing 
or another to eke out a bookless and homeless exist- 
ence. One kept a hired house fall of boarders. 
None of the pastors were educated, and after other 
people had made considerable progress in scientific 
inquiry, some of these pastors still warned the 
youth of their congregations against "the unscrip- 



THE veteran's PAPER. 41 

tural assertions of geology and like sciences", and 
against the use of human reason as irrelevant in 
matters of religion. A merchant, intelligent, elo- 
quent, sceptical as to surrounding theological senti- 
ments, caught the ears of the youth and set their 
hearts for a generation against all religion as repre- 
sented in the churches, and in multitudes of cases 
against all thought of religion. This condition con- 
tinued with little or no improvement even after a 
somewhat higher intelligence occupied the city 
pulpits. 

Quite recently the writer lived for some years in 
a college town in another part of this same Keserve. 
In a township of six hundred resident voters and 
the usual number of sectarian organizations, sixty 
voters is, by actual count, the usual attendance of 
voters. The pastors are so poorly paid as to be cut 
off from the privileges of clever well-to-do citizens. 

The minority of the residents who hold them- 
selves together in these organizations seem honestly 
astonished that so many well meaning people keep 
themselves aloof from all so called religious organi- 
zations. Each is absolutely sure, however, of his 
own position. Each sees the relentless and deaden- 
ing effect of division, and blames each the other 
organizations for their obstinacy in refusing to drop 
their little differences and come over to them. 

The cases of persons whose zeal leads them to 
great self denial, even to the point of suffering and 
of denying their families needed privileges and even 
comforts, excite the pity of those outside. Asking, 



42 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

however, well-to-do farmers why they and their 
families do not attend church, the answer is prompt 
and evidently well considered, "We can not afford 
it. The effort to support in this community four 
full-fledged churches and another fitful effort at one 
is preposterous. The wives of small farmers have 
a hard time of it at best. We must educate our 
children in these days, and have some papers and 
books for them, or see them boors in the midst of 
an active-minded, progressive age. Seeing the bur- 
dens of those who are struggling to keep up these 
different organizations, and their zeal, we at home 
sympathize with them — pity them. But we have 
friends in all the churches here and see no reason 
for helping one and not another. We can not help 
all, nor do we see why we should yield our judg- 
ment and join in with a practice which is contrary 
to our deliberate and well considered convictions. 
We much regret these conditions, as our experi- 
ences in life emphasize the necessity of neighborly 
organizations for moral, religious, and otherwise 
cultivating and elevating influences. For want of 
such organizations and social activities a retired 
physician charges that our women have noticeably 
deteriorated in intelligence and in culture during 
the later decades." 

In cities the church societies may be large enough 
to reduce the evils arising from these division. In 
the country and smaller towns "it seems a pity", 
say these farmers, "that not religious but acknowl- 
edged non-essential differences, often as to misty 



THE veteran's PAPER. 43 

and attenuated and even traditional and forgotten 
distinctions, should absolutely block, or so greatly 
retard, moral and intellectual progress". 

That other than doctrinal differences play a lead- 
ing part in maintaining these awkward divisions 
among God's professed servants abundant evidence 
is at hand. I adduce one item. While living in 

, I yielded to an invitation of an Episcopal 

clerical friend to superintend his Sunday-school, 
and thus to kill two birds with the stone I must put 
into my sling, for a Methodist Sunday-school of 
which I was then superintendent, and where, as a 
member of the Presbyterian church, — not repre- 
sented in that part of the city, — I was freely and 
without criticism illustrating Scripture truths from 
all the various fields of thought ; including, on some 
important points, as concerning the origin and sig- 
nificance of sacrifices, the Swedenborgian writers. 
I continued in both these positions some three 
years, and until I went to the war. 

Teaching freely what seemed to me the lessons of 
the text, I was never made aware of having scan- 
dalized the adherents of any of the living issues, 
among the sects of my acquaintance, except on one 
particular point. When a student, with an immer- 
sionist tutor in Greek, I accepted what seemed the 
weight of linguistic evidence in favor of his trans- 
lation of the word Baptize. When a change of 
locality afterward occasioned a change in church 
relations, I was immersed. On further study I 
taught my present views, distinctly stating, as I 



44 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

now do, that I asked no one to adopt them as essen- 
tial to fraternal relations or religious co-operation. 
But my neighbors were not yet Spurgeons, perhaps 
for want of a leader like Spurgeon. 

The tenderly cherished idea with the immersionist 
seemed to be that he was following Christ in this act 
of immersion. But John's baptism was unto re- 
pentance. Was Christ baptized unto repentance? 
Repentance as to what? Christian baptism, as 
practiced by the apostles (they so far ignoring 
John's baptism as even to re-baptize those who had 
been the recipients of his baptism), was "for the re- 
mission of sins". Had Christ sins to be remitted? 

Anticipating the question of the pharisees : **By 
what authority are you teaching in the temple", 
Christ went to John, a priest, and underwent the 
lavation prescribed for admission to the office of 
teacher; "For thus it behooveth us to fulfill the 
law'''' . Is the Christian church to-day on the plane 
of the Jewish law? And do disciples of to-day fol- 
low Him in this purpose and act? 

If Christian baptism, as distinguished from 
John's baptism, is sought, can any one claim to 
know so certainly that immersion was its form, as 
to be willing to cut the bride of Christ in two on this 
point? 

Christ once or twice mentioned baptism: "Be- 
lieve th and is baptized". But how baptized? John 
tells us that Christ's baptism is "with the Holy 
Ghost and with Fire" ! So, while I am not dis- 
posed to dictate that my immersing brother shall 



THE veteran's PAPER. - 45 

not read this passage, " Belie veth and is baptized 
by immersion", will he claim the right to excom- 
municate me, if I read it, " Believe th and is baptized 
with the Holy Ghost and with Fire"? 

I break off thus abruptly, being best pleased that 
the statement of a few facts, for all of which I vouch, 
shall indicate my views and constitute my argument 
for the day. 

I am happily excused from suggesting a remedy 
for these conditions by the prevailing sentiment of 
the club that these will come better after the neces- 
sity for these remedies shall more fully appear in 
the light of facts to be yet presented. 



THE BOY. 

And were you ne'er a farmer's boy, 

And did you never fish, 
And feel like conquering Bounaparte 

Anent your crispy dish ? 

How many times three cross-lot chums 
Spurred each his cows afield, 

And met at rock- walled fishing pools 
While matin thunders pealed. 

For when the rain is pouring down 

And lashing bubbles up, 
The shyest trout may snatch a worm 

From near the water's top. 

An hour, so short to hearts in tune, 
Oft brought us sixty fishes. 

To meet bright, welcoming eyes at home 
We part with winks and wishes. 



46 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Ye saints who love a God that's far, 
And mock a man that 's near, 

Why clepe a boy a reprobate 
And vex with pagan fear? 

Before your systems logical 

Have caught him in their clutch, 

His inspiration's fairly fair, 

"God's kingdom is of such". 

We used to wish to be as good 

As Samuel or David ; 
Be men like Jay or Washington 

And in the end be saved. 

But Dominie and Deacon come 
With schoolmen's catechisms 

To chain our souls to silly crimes 
And doubts with sillygisms. 

And when with awe we 've taken in 
Their wondrous wise conclusions, 

Christ's simple, " He who will may drink", 
Seems whelmed in weired confusions. 

Let the old dead inter their dead 
Where old astrology sleeps. 

Just take a boy for what he is 

And "train him up" for keeps. 

I was a boy myself, have known 
Ten thousand glorious boys, 

I love a brave, aspiring lad, 

And share his hopes and joys. 

I wish he knew what life is w^orth 

As well as I know now, 
And how it pays to cultivate 

The brain beneath his brow. 



THE veteran's PAPER. 47 

I wish he knew what faith is worth, 

And temperance, pureness, truth ; 
And how the whole of hfe will fare 

By what he gains in youth. 

I wish he knew, as I know now, 

Without the pain to learn it, 
That sin is hell eternally, 

And lures the soul to hurn it. 

I wish he knew, as I know now, 

How love has always striven 
To tear men's cobwebs from God's law. 

And draw each soul toward heaven.. 



48 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 



CHAPTER lY. 

PAPER OP THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

After returning to God, in a clean napkin and a costly metallic 
case, a promising son, ruined by the credulous trust of the 
father in intimate churchly associations, sovereign grace, 
and periodical revivals. 

"At thirty man suspects himself a fool; knows it at forty". — Young. 

My friendly neighbors, I have given the above 
title to this paper because, some years ago, God 
delivered to me a priceless treasure, as I at first 
thought. I was afterwards told, instead, that the 
child, like all children born into the world, was an 
object offensive in the sight of God from its birth, 
and "utterly incapable of attaining any genuine 
perfections". Besides feeling that I had no time 
to study into the subject myself, I had been ac- 
customed to hear our most learned orators pride 
themselves on being the representatives of a people 
whose special glory was conservatism, a disposition 
to hold loyally to the old systems of religious 
thought and practice. Forgetting for the time that 
this was also the cherished glory of Italy, Spain, 
Mexico and India, I fell into line and relegated all 
religious considerations to a single Sunday hour 
with its three hymns, two prayers and a composi- 
tion. The resulting conditions of society easily 



PAPER OP THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 49 

glossed the stinted care I bestowed on the child, 
and the circumstance of mj early yielding him 
back to his Maker in a clean napkin and a costly 
metallic case. 

God gave the child to me with the injunction to 
"Bring him up in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord", and with many golden promises, as it 
seemed to me. I especially remarked this one : 
"Train up a child in the way he should go, and 
when he is old he will not depart from it". The 
heart of his mother and my heart were glad, and 
we went about our labors with joyfulness and with 
grateful, hopeful feeling. I am an artist, and one 
day my eye fell upon this beautiful picture in words, 
and I recognized, as I then thought, the true heart 
of an artist in them: "Suffer little children to 
come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven". I had myself thought to paint some- 
thing which should suggest to the minds of men a 
true idea of heavenly purity. And I now cut those 
words from the book and pasted them on the wall 
before me. And as I worked their significance and 
beauty grew upon me. I then put these other 
words of the same artist beside them, for I had 
come better to appreciate him as a divine artist, 
since in all my life I had seen no pictures so full of 
meaning and interest : "Except ye become as little 
children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom 
of heaven". 

And I studied the child, and the pictures grew. 
For I found, as it seemed to me, that a child is not 



50 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

only beautiful, innocent, and pure, but that a more 
striking characteristic of him is that he has a 
natural desire to trust in his father and mother and 
to grow and become large and strong and capable 
of doing things which large and strong people do. 
In a thousand ways he showed this. This fact 
filled the pictures with infinite wealth of meaning 
to me, greater than I had ever seen. I said, what 
is more beautiful than the thought that fitness for 
heaven should consist largely in aspiration and in 
desire to grow into something more large and 
worthy, and man-like and god-like, than in the 
hourly, simple effort to do things worthy and manly 
and like a hero, or highly endowed soul ; with no 
thought of reward, except the sheer pleasure of 
doing them, and the thought that it was noble and 
good to do them? 

And afterwards my work grew upon me and I 
became absorbed in designing for Christian homes 
and for Christian churches. And for this my work, 
the pictures had filled my mind with richer and 
more graceful and sublime and confident thought. 
But as I worked, I came into contact with children 
who were perverse, disobedient, self indulgent and 
cruel. I observed, also, that half grown children 
of church members, and even of God's "called" 
servants were any thing but pure and truthful in 
their talk and, behavior. And I was overwhelmed 
with wonder at this. And then I heard one of 
these "called" servants of more than the average 
intelligence among them, preach. 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 51 

He began his discourse by saying that "no one 
can preach the gospel or teach Bible truths except 
those who have been called of God for that purpose. 
The ministerial body is in no sense a profession, it 
is a vocation, as the members do not chose their 
work, nor are they chosen by the church, nor by 
men. "Ye have not chosen Me but I have chosen 
you.'' I had supposed these words like those fol- 
lowing : "These things I command you that ye love 
one another", applied to all of God's children. I 
was sorry and perplexed to find that I was mis- 
taken. 

It was of the purpose of his discourse to advise his 
hearers to educate their children. "But in trying to 
educate them it is fitting that you remember the in- 
terests of the schools and colleges of our church, for 
obvious reasons. It is also fitting that in their edu- 
cation you should remember the cardinal principles 
of our church. You may educate your children and 
thus train them to become lawyers, or physicians, 
or farmers. But you can not educate them, train 
them to become Christians". Now, in view of 
God's command, which I had firmly supposed would 
pledge his own interest and co-operation in the mat- 
ter, and in view of the pictures which seemed to be 
so full of truth and of instruction, this discourse — 
for the quotation is literal — perplexed me much. 

And I just then heard two of the "vocation", A 
"called" to preach immersion and B "called" to 
preach sprinkling, discuss the case of another of the 
"vocation", who, in a book, which my wife and I 



52 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

had learned to regard with interest, denied squarely 
one of the cardinal dogmas in which the two mem- 
bers of the "vocation" happened to agree. Ifc was 
this doctrine of the "total depravity of the children 
brought into the world by Adam and Eve, and their 
utter inability to understand God's commands and 
to obey them". I particularly remember how A de- 
clared with great vehemence that "the recent con- 
ference of B's church had done violence to the 
church universal by dropping the matter so easily. 
Why, they should have excommunicated him, or, at 
least, have silenced or suspended him from the min- 
istry. They did not even censure him. ' 'Yes, there 
is certainly no doctrine more explicitly taught in 
scripture than the total depravity of all children 
born into the world", said B. "Why", interposed 
A, "the curse was never removed from that woman. 
Genesis iii, 16, settles that question". 

Passing the question how they could silence a 
man "called" of God to preach, I began to think that 
I had been too enthusiastic about the capabilities of 
the boy, and that the "Training" of such a being in 
the way of righteousness was addle talk. Accord- 
ingly, in view of the pictures and of the command 
and promise, I felt as I think I should feel if the 
foundations of the earth should give way ; nay, 
worse, as it involved the eternal interests of one 
dearer to me than my life. 

Not being at home, where I could observe the con- 
dition of my child under the godly "Training" of his 
godly mother, my hopes as to the boy began to wane. 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 53 

I felt that I had neither education nor time to study 
into a system so arbitrary, and complicated, as be- 
ing wholly historical and outside the suggestions of 
reason, and I gradually lost interest in the matter. 
Just then my wife was killed in a railroad acci- 
dent, and I gave the child into the hands of a woman 
learned and actively interested in all the tenets and 
practices of the church. The child was sent to 
school with other children so situated, and to Sab- 
bath School, where he was taught that some day an 
evangelist would come along, with an order on God 
for an outpouring of God's spirit in his pocket, and 
that, may be, he, the boy, would be "converted and 
obtain a hope" of going to a heaven a great way 
off, where it would be very easy to be good and to 
do good, by trying to make other people happy and 
good, though those going there had done nothing 
but evil up to the day they died. He was also 
there taught that it would be very easy for him to 
"get religion and obtain a hope" when the evangelist 
came with the order for the "outpouring". But, 
alas, before the church could raise the money to 
pay the evangelist, the boy had wandered away 
into the wilderness of sin with other children so en- 
trusted as he had been. He continued alternately 
in the wilderness and in Sunday School. And I 
once saw the boy that his lips were eaten with nico- 
tine. And I explained to him and urged him to 
refrain from this and other dangerous practices. 
From his part of the conversations, which on two 



54 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

or three occasions followed, I give a summary, 
using his words : 

"Yes", said he, in answer to my persuasions, *'I 
used to think much on these subjects you refer to. 
But the more I saw and thought the less they 
seemed to awaken interest in me. I was one day 
at dinner with sixteen members of a ministerial 
conference, for example. The bishop was there, 
and after dinner about half of the preachers went 
to another room to smoke. I will not say there 
were cigarettes there, for I do not remember. But 
one said, as he lighted his cigar, 'Brethren, I have 
tried many times to break off this habit, but I do 
not succeed.' Well, I also wanted to quit these 
cigarettes and was much surprised to find it so dif- 
ficult ; so much so that I felt a degree of envy, I 
suppose, toward men who talked of divine help in 
such emergencies, supposing them to have obtained 
such help. But I was now led to doubt whether there 
was really any power in the religion which these 
people represented, to help me. The topic of con- 
versation at the table had been on a subject which 
led to the unanimous assertion that men had no 
power to help themselves. If his religion would not 
assist him to break off a habit which he considered 
wrong, whether it is so or not, what was left but to 
go on, even in a practice which we know to be 
harmful, sinful. 

"Besides this, when the reports on which depend 
re-appointments were called at the conference, 
which I attended with Mrs. Mecum, each declared 



PAPER OP' THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 55 

that Ms charge was in excellent condition, and that 
the work of the Lord was prospering in his hands. 
Meanwhile I knew that the only business which 
prospered in our town was the w^hiskey business. 
I had been well over the district with my foster 
mother, and, excepting in the prohibition towns, 
this was true. No additions had been made to our 
church during the year, and I hear little of that 
going on. 

"Furthermore, a resolution was introduced into 
this same conference to recognize as coadjutors in 
God's work, the W. C. T. U., the temperance or- 
ganization of our state, whose sole object, as de- 
clared by themselves, was to reform the drinking 
habit, and to promote social purity. This was 
sharply discussed and promptly voted down, with 
much show of feeling regarding the fact that 
* women were intruding upon the domain of clergy- 
men'. The feeling of personal interest not only 
shone through their argument, but stood to the 
front. 'Certain departments of literature have 
been nearly monopolized by women already' . 'But' , 
it was answered, 'this question takes hold of her 
special interests. If we would only consider how 
much women suffer from this drinking habit of their 
husbands and sons'. 'To be sure, but it was Eve 
who brought all sin into the world. And on this 
account, her desire was to be unto her husband, — 
to man, to whom she is to be in subjection.' Hav- 
ing examined the text. Gen. iii, 16, on which this 
notion was based, and found it utterly groundless, 



56 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

I was shocked and angered by the talk. I have 
here in my scrap book two recent printed sermons, 
occasioned by the growing activity of woman under 
her strong and long-suppressed desire to see quick- 
ened the slow and fitful progress of men toward the 
liigher planes of life. Many of the passages in 
these sermons were repeated in this discussion, and 
as I have marked them, you may rely upon their 
accuracy, as thus : *It is not a matter of reason nor 
of reasoning,— these questions of divine truth'. 
'This very disposition of hers to be restless under 
the teaching of the Word as interpreted by God's 
servants, and to suffer her sympathies and feelings 
to interfere and misconstrue the Word, is the very 
reason against permitting her to meddle with great 
questions.' 

"It is a Rabbinical saying : 'Burn the Book of the 
Law rather than put it into the hands of a woman', 
and we may well add the same of any other great 
interests.' 'Some invisible artist has set it before 
her mind's eye that it would be pleasant to try her 
hand at things which God has committed solely to 
the hands of men'. '■Teaching implies authority^ and 
woman has no authority. Millions of women have 
the ability to teach and lead men, but God does not 
permit them to do it. He shall rule over thee. 
She may learn at home. This was God's punish- 
ment of woman for the part she took in the first 
transgression. Has it ever been abrogated? iVo, 
the snake still goes on its belly ^ thorns and thistle still 
grow as a constant reminder to woman that she fell and 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 57 

involved the whole race in total depravity \ 'Brethren, 
let us not permit our sympathies to run away with 
our judgments. We shall find that Christ did not 
interfere with this regulation. In organizing His dis- 
pensation He said nothing and He did nothing to war- 
rant a departure from the Jewish doctrines and practice 
in reference to woman\ It takes but half of a secu- 
lar eye to see that the permanently debased condi- 
tion of woman, under the Jewish system, resulted 
from the 'hard-heartedness' of the Jews in those 
older times. It takes little more to see that by 
quoting this ancient authority in order to keep her 
thus subject, we adopt the sensuous and heartless 
spirit of this authority. How, then, shall we desig- 
nate the spirit which stumbles blindfold into this 
depth for the purpose of defending a presumptuous 
claim to absolutely exclusive privileges in a fairly 
competitive interest, like teaching?' 

*'A11 this meant more to us than our interest in the 
subject under discussion warranted, since we looked 
upon woman's position of influence as now too well 
established to be affected by such evidently sinister 
considerations. The discussion was significant to 
us as it exemplified the professional habit of thought 
regarding the scheme they represented, and their 
assumed 'authoritative' relation to it. Instead of a 
system of thought founded in the nature of things, 
of man's manifest relations to God and to his co- 
partners in life's interests, religion was to be ac- 
cepted as an historic system, built by a profession 
on traditions which became authoritative doctrines 



58 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

when passed upon by some historic but uninspired 
councils, though the system is openly admitted, 
even claimed, to be independent of all reason. 

"From this effort to exemplify certain current 
methods of argumentation, it is not to be inferred 
that we young fellows are in favor of woman's 
preaching. She has far higher and more fruitful, 
if less pretentious work to do. 

' 'The crowded houses to enjoy the nourishing Bible 
lessons of Miss Gordon, after the sacerdotal attempt, 
through one of the sermons above referred to, to 
refuse her a place in which to read the Bible, show 
how the people hunger for this change from the 
cold, unchallenged, and often irrelevant dicta of 
trained and untrained 'pulpit talent', to the direct 
study of God's unmanipulated thoughts, to spiritual 
communion and its promise of growth in Christian 
graces. They seem enamored of such simple and 
genuine characters as Timothy's, which Paul de- 
clares to have resulted from the superior work of 
Lois and Eunice in teaching him the scripture. 
Thus, by the way, Paul rebukes the sinister pre- 
sumption which makes him a witness in favor of 
eternally crushing woman as unfit to teach the 
scripture on account of her 'disposition to miscon- 
strue', implying the puerile notion of woman's 
racial tendency, as distinguished from man's, to 
jeopard her own interests, with those of her family, 
and that with her eyes open. 

"What seems especially strange to us boys is, 
that in order to secure salvation, to avoid hell, and 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT, 69 

what seems worse, the charge of 'infidelity', we are 
expected to accept the sacerdotal scheraes of inter- 
pretation of God's word, not only, but all the dreams 
which these doctors have taken time from work 
which they tell us is important, to chase down to 
some Rabbinical retreat, and which are often 
founded on racial or temporary characteristics, and 
with which we have in these days little sympathy. 
Indeed, we think it not inappropriate to ask, if an 
age so enlightened on all subjects of human interest 
as the present age, can not do as good thinking, 
when honestly earnest to do so, as could those who 
lived before the dawn of Christianity or of the 
Reformation, what are the advantages of the dawn 
and of its centuries of experiences? 

"It is quite evident that we boys are not alone in 
our doubt — skepticism — on this subject. Neither in 
city nor country, for some reason, is there a nervous 
rush to 'preaching services', though a score of mo- 
tives tend to draw various classes of people thither- 
ward ; as the whole list of social instincts, the 
music, the fashions, habit, the general interest in 
religious concerns for the sake of the family. With 
four churches in this place, for example, and a fifth 
handful trying to start another, there are two thou- 
sand to attend, of which seventy, one hundred and 
twenty, fifteen, and ten, are, by frequent count, 
the attendance Sunday after Sunday. It therefore 
seems to us that the subject, as it is presented, is 
quite widely considered of little intrinsic interest. 

"With the growing intellectual activities of the 



60 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

day, leading to more intimate relations among men, 
in industries, schools, colleges, where individual 
and social interests are worked out in harmony, the 
wonder grows that this greatest of all interests must 
be permitted to halt and grope in the old paths and 
superstitious entanglements, from which other in- 
terests have freed themselves. 

"The sectaries protest that their differences do not 
embrace the essentials of religion, yet they pride 
themselves, among themselves, in keeping up these 
differences, whistle at the increased expense ; de- 
claring that this and the smallness of results are 
nobody's business but their own. They seem to 
forget that their assumptions carry with them in- 
terests very vital to society and to individuals. 

"For example, the denominational college I at- 
tended was constantly and sorely pinched for means 
to keep abreast with the times. It continually ap- 
pealed to the community. It even adjured the leg- 
islature not to give the state university such an ad- 
vantage as would enable it to draw from this school. 
The legislature, afraid to refuse, yielded. Judged 
by the church attendance, as above, and by the con- 
tinued poverty of the school, a very small per cent 
of the community seem desirous of contributing to 
an interest so defiantly exclusive and yet so persist- 
ently obtrusive. 

"All this happens though public speakers con- 
stantly talk orthodoxy here, and church member- 
ship is universally held to be a winning card in 
politics. Thus these sectaries not only fail to reach 



PAPER OP THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 61 

the ears of a community with the essentials of re- 
ligion through a door closed against the 'world' by 
the non-essentials, but by aggressive persistence in 
occupying the field of higher education, they furnish 
excuse to a large majority of the community to turn 
a deaf ear to this essential interest of community as 
well. God only knows what is to result from the 
consequent growing estrangement of whole classes, 
from all Protestant religious influences. 

''But I am young and perhaps impracticable. Yet 
these things are often talked over by us boys. We 
are not so blind as not to see that it is a matter of 
great interest to us who are coming on to the stage, 
that the best possible conditions of society should 
be secured. We have often heard it said, even by 
Protestant sectaries, that it would be impossible to 
maintain any religious scheme except through these 
personal interests and by the help of this party 
spirit. If this is so, we all agree that the scheme 
itself is too narrow to engage our interest or our 
faith. Education, as a subject of human interest, 
carries to the mind an invincible conviction of its 
value and efficiency. Millions are given to its sup- 
port by individuals and by legislatures, with the 
sanction of all thoughtful people. The confessed 
necessity of propping the present system in the 
manner urged by its supporters, is so suggestive of 
their own skepticism as to its intrinsic value and 
adequacy as greatly to undermine confidence in its 
divinity. 

*'The sectaries bolster themselves on the claim that 



62 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

all the progress of the race has come from their 
methods, and that the rate of this progress reflects 
great credit on these methods. The world sees 
reason to believe that what slow progress has been 
made has come largely through the instinct of re- 
ligion and righteousness which God has, despite all 
denial, planted in the individual breast, and which 
he could not, in justice and reason, have neglected 
to plant in the hearts of moral beings, held account- 
able to a moral code. These have been aided by a 
Bible as open to the world as to the sectaries, and 
have been quickened by that spirit which He sends 
'to lighten every man coming into the world'. It 
may even be said that they come largely in spite of 
the jealousies, hair splittings, and bitter persecu- 
tions of those who, in all the Christian centuries, 
have assumed to shape and control human concerns 
through sacerdotal methods alone. 

' 'Another instance of the superficial plausiveness 
of these sacerdotal interests is the somewhat recent 
invention of an answer to outside criticism : 'Our 
only requirement for admission is the assertion, "I 
take Christ as my Savior" '. I have heard this 
hollow boast from officials in several denominations. 

"And this figleaf is intended to cover the fact 
that the several denominations using it are daily 
planting from two to seven of their distinctive 
church organizations in each settled township in 
America ; the further fact that they add to this 
burden on these often scattered communities, an 
exacting appeal for contributions to support denom- 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 63 

inational colleges, theological and other schools, 
separate missionary enterprises, and all other evi- 
dences of partisan striving. While the specious 
formula does not excuse all this, it does relieve the 
critic from the labor of seeking proof of the trivial 
character of church differences, and of showing 
that the real reason for the persistent existence of 
this partisan system is not in the nature of the 
subject itself, but in some of its personal incidents. 

"When my mother was with me, it was a familiar 
thought that there was about us a living presence 
that attuned the air with the charm of its sym- 
pathizing interest in us. She seldom spoke to me 
of heaven, but had an unspeakable joy in the 
spiritual, heaven-like influences which I was led by 
her experience and my own, to feel were concerned 
and working for us both. It seemed to me parental, 
like her influence, and as I saw the manifestation 
of parental love in mothers, and even in animals, I 
was beginning to realize with great pleasure that 
the spiritual world, which she taught me was the 
real world, was full of this yearning concern and 
helpfulness. It seemed like the constant presence 
of a brooding life, which makes grass grow con- 
stantly, and larger plants, like corn, to grow with 
a seemingly conscious pleasure. She led me often 
to observe when trees or herbs were injured, how 
this pervading life set itself to heal the hurt. 

*'This world I thus came to think of, not as 
strongly then as I am capable of doing now, as a 
sort of outward manifestation of the real life and 



64 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

essence of things, much as words are a manifesta- 
tion of, or mode of manifesting thoughts ; though 
they are not thoughts, and are nothing except as 
continents of the thought or idea which is the real 
substance of them as words. The thought seems 
now remotely familiar to me that this universal, 
brooding life joined itself to the inherent life of the 
plant, anxious that health, wholeness should every- 
where prevail, and seemingly jealous of, and ready 
to rally against any harmful influence, and to heal 
at once, if hurtful influences temporarily prevailed. 
I was led to believe that this higher life or spiritual 
influence from God, would be thus helpful and 
healing, as it was the real life on the physical, 
intellectual and moral planes of our being. 

"We used to read much scripture responsively. 
Her finger tips seemed to know every refreshing 
spring of sympathy in the Word ; every expression 
of God's tenderly affectionate interest in the race ; 
every pathetic or eloquent appeal to patriotism, to 
tribal interest or family love ; every longing prayer for 
higher attainments in a divine life, and of yearning to 
know more of God, that we might love Him more and 
honor Him in our lives. Her clear, richly resonant and 
tender tones and appreciative emphasis threw about 
and into this exercise a charm, the sweet pleasure 
of which I have often longed for, even when my 
companions have thought me frivolous or censorious 
toward what they had been taught to regard as the 
end of living, a distant scenic heaven, of whose 
absorbing importance, together with that of a 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 65 

distant lake of fire and brimstone, I got my first 
glimpse in the 'arousements' of the seemingly soon 
forgotten revivals ; forgotten because they never 
reached the conscious present interest of the true 
soul, that appreciates only conditions and qualities 
of being, leaving the valuation of relations to the 
colder intellect ; forgotten as I now see, because 
these appeals to so foreign an interest, made no 
'Character' (an impress, as the image on coins, or 
engravings in stone, see the Greek), — no character, 
or fixed characteristics in the soul of the hearer. 
The object of these appeals seemed foreign to such 
purpose. 

"Although my mother possessed a very sensitive, 
artistic nature, she seemed strong and self-contained 
as a growing tree, and an accident or incipient ail- 
ment seemed as naturally healed. She never 
seemed to eschew professional help as bringing the 
experience and science of the race to work the 
more certainly with nature. But the conscious 
dominance of her active spiritual being seemed 
such that she was almost never called on to resort 
to other help. This I came to feel was in conse- 
quence of the intimate indwelling of her life in 
this living world, or world of life about us and 
within us. 

"I thus began to get a sense of what we might 
be and do, if we might learn to turn our lives 
toward this higher life, instead of keeping them 
always turned toward the lower, sensuous life. 
I then thought it could not be far to see how this 



66 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

realizes the Christ thought : ^Seek the kingdom of 
heaven first, and all the agencies of the world shall 
bow to thy will as they easily do to mine'. And 
yet she taught me that the spiritual life is neither 
at the beginning nor end of ultimate sensuous aims ; 
but that good is strength, and health is wholeness, 
and that these, pervading the being, bring us nearer 
the attainment of all human possibilities than the 
dawdling, half-developed being can do. 

'*Now it seemed to me that, when, since my 
mother left me, I have approached this, which I 
used to regard as the domain of real religion, I have 
seldom been able to recognize travelers who have 
been this way. It may be that I am mistaken, not 
being near enough to these people to know. But 
when I have read to them from the lives of such 
wholesome religious characters as Mother Wesley 
and others, these experiences have seemed foreign to 
them, and the notion seems to prevail that few peo- 
ple look for such attainments now. I gathered in 
this way, also, differently from what my mother 
thought, that all inspirations of the Almighty were 
regarded as having respect to long ages ago, to his- 
toric prophecies mostly, even then, and that God 
had now ceased entirely to communicate with men, 
except to 'call' men to preach. 

"So, I came to think that if God was done with 
His active leadership and interest in men when the 
prophets died, and if religion brought nothing but 
a hope of heaven hereafter, and escape from a far 
distant hell, I might possibly go with the rest, take 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 67 

what pleasures offered, and attend to religion later. 
My earlier experiences I rather relegated, as others 
probably would do, to the realm of imagination. 
The result is what you see. I am dying, not slowly, 
but surely. 

"I wish I could make it plain, how utterly nothing 
to me now are the oldest Calvinisms and the newest 
Campbellisms, meaning different denominational 
'Schemes of salvation', meaning the machinery 
for getting to heaven. I want real chains, whose 
pressure makes me feel that I am a slave, broken. 
I want joys which I have once felt rekindled. 
How the account stands, which Christ's righteous- 
ness can cancel, does not trouble me. I am weak, 
debased, worthless, through negligence and sin. I 
want to become strong again, to stand on the high 
plane of a pure, purposeful humanity, where I may 
live a true, manly life. Though I have never heard 
it touched upon since my mother left me, I now 
again feel, know it to have been, to be the purpose 
of Christ's effort to inspire and assist the actually 
fallen to regain this plane of life, and to inspire and 
assist those concerned so to rear human beings that 
they may remain on such a plane through life and 
forever. 

"It is too late to wish that I could live my years 
again. And yet without this I can never be what I 
wish to be. And yet I feel, I know that every moral 
instinct in the universe seconds my effort still to oc- 
cupy those planes, and that, reciprocally, I owe it to 
them to make the effort. If I may now but live, ' ' 



68 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

And the boy died. And when he was dead, I 
prayed mightily to the Lord. But there was 
nothing which I could say for myself, except that 
I had done as others did. Yet in my anguish I 
cried with the prophet, Nahum, "The best of them 
is a brier ; the most upright is sharper than a thorn 
hedge. Trust ye not in a friend, put no confidence 
in a guide. I will wait for the God of my salvation. 
My God will hear me". 

For, though I felt some assurance that the 
vision in his last days of his mother's earnest faith 
and trust in Christ as a heavenly friend, inspira- 
tion and guide, had led the young man to effective 
change of purpose and life, I knew that he had 
lost the personal advantages of a religious character 
here. I knew that his talent, as well as mine, had 
been done up in a napkin and had yielded nothing 
to the good of his fellows or the gratification or 
glory of his heavenly benefactor. With all this, I 
had a lingering doubt, a fear lest his infidelity, like 
that of so many thousands under the same lethar- 
gic influences, might have become a part of him, 
and that what interest he had finally manifested in 
the subject of religion might be out of tenderness 
to me. 

And yet, except in my paroxysms of disappoint- 
ment and grief, I trust that I am far from draw- 
ing general conclusions from individual cases, such 
as have happened to come under my observation. 
In my experience, in the pursuit of my art, and in 
a university professorship, it may have been my 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 69 

misfortune to note how many young men seemed 
to choose the ministry from frivolous motives — the 
promise of to them more respectable positions in 
society y less exhaustive work than farming, for ex- 
ample. 

Outside of these — who remained about as these 
superficial convictions promised — there are thou- 
sands of earnest, thoroughly devoted workers in 
the moral vineyard. These are, while doing the 
best they can where they are, working and praying 
for the conditions which the evolutions of time are 
showing to be desirable and possible. But my very 
close relations with the whole class, both in civil 
life and in the civil war, have taught me that they 
are like other men, no more, no less easily moved 
by personal and family considerations, except as 
their comparative isolation from the bustling and 
militant activities of daily life tend to increase their 
conservatism, and their inclination to avoid con- 
flicts at all doubtful as to their results. So long as 
the world is too busy to dispute their claims to spe- 
cial prerogatives and exclusive authority to speak 
for God, so long they will refuse to relinquish these 
claims. So long as the organizations to wdiichthey 
owe their positions and opportimities in life con- 
tinue to leave the effete thoughts of a narrower and 
more superstitious age unexpunged from their 
standards, so long these men, as other men so situ- 
ated would do, will defend these standards. Yet 
scores of clergymen of my acquaintance are as 
broad in their views as Spurgeon, Phillips Brooks, 



70 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Frederick Robinson, Beecher, Briggs, Charles Terry 
Collins, Ian Maclaren and the other propagators of 
the new Scotch thought of to-day. The thoughts 
of these men put into practical life would do away 
with separate organizations to uphold dogmas, 
merely as such. They would emphasize the su- 
periority of the Bible method of ''Training human- 
ity in the way it should go" over the method 
founded on the incidental conditions in which the 
Apostles found the world — the missionary method, 
which sought merely to convince the crowds. "The 
foolishness of preaching" seemed the only feasible 
way of accomplishing that work. The condition of 
Christian nations during the centuries in which 
this office has assumed the whole field of Christian 
labor, so largely to the exclusion of parental and 
other individual effort, hardly justifies the universal 
dependence on this method, even for extending the 
gospel over new fields. The wresting of the Bible 
from exclusive sacerdotal control, and the securing, 
more recently, of lay delegation, and still more re- 
cently of a voice in conventions, is a discreet advance. 
After my so painful experience, and in the 
earnest mood it engendered, I read much scripture 
for myself. In Genesis iii, 16, I read the account 
of the so-called cursing of "that woman". Eve, and 
with her the whole of the race of man. I quote 
Luther's version: "To the woman he said, there is 
created for thee much pain when thou art with 
child ; it is for thee to bear children in pain ; and 
thy desires shall be resigned to thy husband and he 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 71 

shall be a lord to thee". That is all. Read it, my 
lay brother, and tell me if any thing less than an 
in-and-in-bred professional desire to bolster a pre- 
adjudged case, could have read in or betwixt these 
lines the words, "Total depravity of all the offspring 
of that woman and the corruption of the nature of 
every man that naturally is engendered of the off- 
spring of Adam, which in every person born into 
this world deserveth God's wrath and damnation"? 
Is a word said of this mysterious episode's affecting 
Eve's moral character or moral condition, or the 
character or condition of her offspring? 

Read the next four verses. Is Adam in any way 
cursed in his own person or in his seed after him ? 
It is mentioned to the credit of Seth, afterward born, 
that "he was born in the likeness of Adam and in his 
image", which was the image of God at the first, and 
no mention is meanwhile made that Adam had lost it. 
When Abraham and others are blessed God is quite 
apt to add, "and thy seed after thee". Yet not a 
word here of cursing Adam or his seed. In that 
reference God seemed still pleased with His work. 
Note also that the serpent always went on his belly 
through all the geological ages. Being poisonous, 
he must always have been "cursed above all cat- 
tle" ; and note that thorns and thistles grew in the 
coal period. 

I can not take time to go over the whole ground. 
Though not a pleasant task, it is not a difficult one, 
to show that there is no scripture support for the 
star-chamber indictment against the race, and 



72 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

equally against God for his alleged mismanagement 
of the infant interests of mankind. I have come 
out of a wide study of the case, loaded with shame 
for my credulity and its results. I can not see but 
that, then as now, God is disposed to give humanity 
the best of it in the hand to hand struggle with 
good and evil, which, for the wisest reasons, seems 
to be an essential element in our probationary, char- 
acter-forming life. "He that overcometh" , the rich- 
est imagery is exhausted to tell what he shall be- 
come. 

The spirit of the episode exhibits the embryo of 
a cheerful rather than a gloomy view of God's in- 
tentions toward men. 

If the serpent shall bruise the heel of man, in 
man's effort to overcome a poisonous evil, the man 
shall make pomace of the serpent's head on the 
spiritual plane, as he commonly does on the earthly 
plane. In the troubles incident to life, "the desires 
of the woman shall resign themselves, throw them- 
selves under [see Luther's translation and the dic- 
tionary] her husband and he shall be a lord to her." 
To a civilized man can this word lord be used in 
connection with the marital relation and not, in 
proportion to the degree of civilization, suggest 
gallantry, affectionate sympathy, and support, when 
needed, just as the word woman, lady, carries the 
idea of affectionate sympathy and support in her 
husband's trials? 

The statement of commentator Clark and others, 
that "this curse falls on woman more heavily than 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 73 

on other females", would have been modified, if 
these learned men had had the care of cattle for 
many years, had employed German women in their 
fields, or had accompanied Indians on the march. 
As many cattle die in the stringency of parturition 
as women ; more than of these classes. Mrs. Eliza- 
beth Cady Stanton tells her sisters that so much de- 
pends on intelligent care, that, with it, she has be- 
come a mother at day-break and been with her 
family at dinner on the same day. Verily, "I am 
the Lord, thy God. I have no pleasure in the 
death, even of the wicked". 

Adam has, in the previous chapter, and before 
the ^'fall", been assigned the duty of tilling the soil, 
and of keeping the garden ; of gaining dominion 
over things generally. Is it a curse that in this 
labor he enjoys labor's sweet relief and comfort, 
sweat? Does a wise man buy a horse which, by 
some defect in his constitution, refuses to sweat? 
And does any one now consider it a curse that the 
earth becomes serviceable to man only through his 
labor? Does any one fail to magnify the Lord that 
He gave man only the crab apple and the almond, 
from which to develop by his innate possibilities of 
creative power, the luscious Pippin and Baldwin, 
the Eberta and the Crawford? Is it a curse that in 
making lightning the direct servant of the race, 
through God's method, work, a Franklin, a Morse, 
a Tesla, an Edison, a Brush, have been given to 
the world? 

Nay, verily, only the gloved class and the over- 



74 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

worked class consider labor, struggle against diffi- 
culties, a curse, and that freedom to choose between 
good and evil, and to enjoy the godly glory result- 
ing from the better choice when the other was 
temporarily attractive, was an oversight on the 
part of the Creator. So, many of the far-fetched 
conclusions of assumed "Authority" would long 
since have given way to more simple and reason- 
able interpretations, but for individual interests in 
the organizations which uphold these notions, just 
as the same organizations upheld the Ptolemaic 
system of astronomy, until lay reasoning easily re- 
futed it, even though malicious persecution therefor 
was the result. 

The age has too much manly and godly work to 
do to be interested in the inventions and quibbles 
of rhetoricians and other pedants. Nor is it fair 
that these inventions should prejudice human in- 
terests. It wants the help of men and women, 
with all the strength of their God given reason and 
of that confidence in God's wise and benevolent de- 
signs toward them all, which it is the effort of 
scripture to beget in them all. In spite of all 
these quibbles, God intended to make men capable 
of understanding that His law was a wise benefi- 
cence, and not a curse. He has done so, and has 
not been thwarted of His great, loving purpose by 
the machinations of a snake. This law and the 
subjects of it He is more profoundly interested in 
than are all the doctors of divinity in the universe. 
Whatever of spiritual enlightenment or other influ- 



PAPER OF THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT, 75 

ence is needed, He is always at hand to supply. 
This influence is as much a part of the economy of 
His loving providence as are the sunshine and the 
rain. No man can raise wheat w^ithout these, yet 
God commands men to sow wheat, and He himself 
and His angels would join with men and devils to 
laugh at a thin-blooded fanatic who would teach or 
believe that God has thrown any obstacles in the 
way of man's raising wheat. They would make 
the laugh still more tantalizing against him who, 
because God has promised rain and sunshine, 
should expect to raise wheat except in 'proportion as 
he plowed deep, manured and harrowed abun- 
dantly, and selected seed with care. The habit of 
neglecting all this and of relegating to the uncer- 
tainties of a yearly bee his part of the work is not 
characteristic of the practical farmer. 

And does God abrogate the law of cause and 
effect in dealing with his moral heritage ? Let us 
leave that belief to those who extract luck from a 
horseshoe and who fear to begin a job on Friday. 
It is not in abrogation of this law that He "pardons 
the penitent and pities the poor", nor that in the 
divine command "Go and sin no more", He pledges 
divine help and healing in the sinner's effort to 
obey the injunction hereafter, and. accepts that 
effort as decisive of his present character. 

God of my sires, in pain of grief 
Where shall I turn to find relief ? 
I 've trusted princes and am slain ; 
Whose words can raise my hopes again ? 



76 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

" Ere men forgot, in Pauline lore, 
Christ's simple life's Truth's open door, 
My * Living Word ' was always rife 
With resurrection power and life ; 

" Healing, absorbing motive, rest ; 
Of all good things the fruitfulest, best. 
I veiled in flesh these gifts divine ; 
That vanished these remain, are thine ; 

"A yearning heart, out-reaching hands ; 
Descend to hell, lo, there He stands". — 
What price, what sacrifice our part ? 
"A contrite, loving, willing heart." 

" For what boots faith, in choir or pew, 
Lets men forget God's work to do ? 
Or what boots blood of victims slain, 
Lets nations sink like Rome and Spain " ? 

Work counts ? 'T is that the creeds ignore. 
I 've given thousands to the poor. 
" Christ fed and healed, then gave Himself; 
(They feed the sea, who give but pelf!) 

" Led men, through sympathy, fairness, right, 
To work their work and fight their fight; 
Stirred deep desires for what is best below. 
And greater things, through heart humane 
mayest thou". 

The way so good, so wise, so plain to find ? 
Dear sexton, leave never a fool behind. 
It was devils in men the Christ bade flee ; 
It is legions of credulous fools in me. 
Bury them all with me, bury them deep ; 
Where yesterday's stakes and witchcrafts sleep. 



PAPER OP THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 77 

Can 't you bury with these, for the Lord's name sake, 
Shame of Edwards' conquest of God by a snake; 
Whose strategy choked God's kind purpose with rage ; 
Which, in turn, keeps His doctors employed to assuage 
With great volumes of wherefores, whereases, sotheres, 
' Nent " Decrees " for entailment of guilt from forebears; 
Made when Reason adjusted the stars, for a minute ; 
(For the doctors still swear that she never was in it ;) 
Eke, without her, constructing a smart compromise ; 
That God take His elect, Snake the mass, as his prize ; 
Snake holding a point more, by fixed stipulation, 
The elect shall leave work to his part of creation. 
And accept all their virtues by sheer imputation, 
Signed and sealed, once for all, by one faith, one lavation; 
Thus scotching Christ's plan for a kingdom on earth, 
And disparaging j ustice and personal worth ? 

" 0, yes, let him bury such subterfuge deep. 
'T is not found in My gospel ; its logic is cheap. 
Thou 'It just find there My urgence to purposeful work. 
All imputements and placatudes savor of shirk. 
Eagles rise but through action ; so stars hold their course. 
If there 's aught on earth fruitful, 'tis purposeful force. 
With the reason which guides me, and hammer in hand, 
Your age gains ' Dominion', my primal command ; 
While frenzy sits nursing her ' Systems of Faith ', 
And men's souls sleep their sleep, in the caverns of death : 
Thou 'rt but one of sad millions, who mourn at the end 
Of by-paths and walled labyrinths men make and de- 
fend ". 



78 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS, 



CHAPTER y. 

THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 

An interview reciting his intelligent studies and methods in 
rearing five stalwart workers for humanity; that is, for 
God. — The results outlined. 

The club met near the cotton mills at the river. 
A party had come the day before to prepare for a 
barbecue, and in the morning had seined fish for a 
fry as well. Six thousand people gathered, all in 
the county who could leave their homes. 

The speaker, a lawyer, had a fine voice. I have 
had no time, said he, to prepare a paper, as all my 
time has been occupied in Yonkers, closing up the 
business of our much esteemed friend just deceased, 
who in the last ten years has done so much to help 
us in quadrupling the wealth of our county, by his 
enterprise as a builder and proprietor of manufac- 
turing plants, and in promoting our pioneer or- 
ganization. His interest in a larger education, and 
his broad, genial and active co-operation in the 
direct effort to build up youthful character among 
us, has especially endeared him to us. Anxious 
to look into the antecedents of a man of such noble 
and efficient activities, I took great interest in an 
interview I secured with his foster father, S. N. 
nioc. 

The foster father of our friend was the son of a 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 79 

Presbyterian clergyman, and was made familiar 
with all the catechetical literature. His mother, 
having been brought up in the "church", con- 
trived to supplement this "religious training", by 
teaching him all the lore of the "establishment", 
to the last guess at the "everlasting purpose of 
God, whereby (before the foundations of the world 
were laid) He hath constantly decreed by His 
council, secret to us, etc." 

Mr. I. married a Methodist wife, and liking bet- 
ter the more simple and less pragmatical faith of 
this church, and on changing his residence, finding 
their place of meeting near his home, he joined 
that church with his wife. He enjoyed a pleasant 
familiarity with their earnest effort to pray them- 
selves clear of an ever-threatening hell of fire and 
brimstone, and to sing themselves into the road to 
the undefined joys of a distant heaven. 

He studied with interest the renewing of their 
hopes at every class-meeting, by the confession of 
sins into which the stimulating of their emotional 
natures, to the neglect of practical religious thought 
and high moral purpose and work, might be ex- 
pected to lead them. 

After two years of this association, he "took the 
gold fever and started overland." In the first 
skirmish of his party with the Indians, a bullet 
pierced the Bible which his wife had put into his 
breast pocket. The incident flashed into his mind 
sweet and comforting reflections of home, and in- 
spired in him a new interest in the book, as if it 



80 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

had been a new and direct message from heaven. 
Its first command, * 'multiply and replenish the 
earth" ; "subdue, have dominion" ; "till the gar-, 
den" : study and classify by significant names, the 
distinguishing characteristics of animals, herbs, 
trees ; in all this he saw emphasized the practical 
interests of our earthly life. He pursued with 
lively concern the embryo thought of the race, its 
vicissitudes, struggles, and slow development under 
several remarkable leaders ; its retrograde move- 
ments ; its superstitions, the progeny of ignorance 
and inexperience ; its occasional glances upward 
toward a God always ready to meet them with the 
"inspirations of the Almighty", which manifestly 
"gave them increased understanding." Reading 
without pre-established opinions which he felt 
called to defend, he found no difficulty in distin- 
guishing the superstitions engendered by ignorance 
or by the proverbial "hardness of heart" and 
sensuousness of the tribes whose history is recorded. 
He studied with interest the development of the 
remarkable characters of Abraham and of Moses. 
He was charmed with the latter's account of God's 
disposition to deal paternally and kindly with the 
tribe, and of His endeavor to permeate all their 
earthly interests with a sense of his paternal re- 
gard. "I am the Lord thy God which brought thee 
out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of 
bondage" ; God the friend, the leader, the su- 
preme object of affection and homage as such ; the 
patient, considerate guide to a life of fruitfulness 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 81 

and good. Departure from His wise counsels will 
be visited with evil results to the transgressor and 
his children. Reverence toward Him, love for 
Him, obedience, through love, to his wise, fertile 
teaching, will secure His direct favor and merciful 
regard. In a far-distant heaven? No. "Godliness 
is profitable to the life that now is as well as to 
that which is to come." The sure footing is to be 
good because good is good, not merely best for all 
concerned, but absolutely good — what health is to 
plant and animal. He who can not understand 
this can not understand heaven. He who must 
have sight of some distant reward to make him 
obedient to good can never be sure that, even in 
heaven, some distant glamour of evil but sweet 
affection, may not lead him away from good. 
What kind of a character would be hers who tried 
to be virtuous in view of some distant promised 
reward? Or his who strove to be honest and 
honorable for fear of a prison? In the Word, 
thus far, at all events, no reference is made to 
this distant hell or heaven. The more we think of 
this, the more wise, safe, philosophical it appears. 
Reflection will teach us that the working of God's 
spirit in man has always had this purpose in view : 
"to make men good and make them ascribe this 
goodness to God," as the infinite source of good, 
that through active goodness men may become one 
with God and with all that is good, here, now and 
forever. 

God and good, then, with no hint of a reason, 



82 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

except that He is God and good. I am the Lord, 
thy good, not shall be. Three commandments are 
devoted to this ; the foundation, the keystone and 
crown of our life. These thoucjhts and feelin^rs are 
to mingle with all our life, and bind it to its high 
purpose of good. That this may not be lost sight 
of, one-seventh of our time is to be set apart to the 
renewal and re-enforcement of these high purposes, 
to the enjoyment of their spiritual fruitage, to com- 
munion with God, with hallowed and hallowing 
things. 

And, secondly, the neighbor. Honor parents ; 
respect the life, chastity, property and reputation 
of the neighbor. Restrain even untoward desires 
for what is not thine by rightful acquisition. Thus, 
again, the earthly life, our earthly relations, are 
emphasized, hallowed, become sacred relations, as 
being objects of God's interest and concern. If 
reverence and love for God is a fiat of our being, 
put there in the act of creation, then love for and 
interest in the neighbor is a fiat of our being, a sine 
qua non of its proper development and enjoyment ; 
'*that thy days may be long among thy people." 

I saw also, said Mr. I., this to be the crown- 
ing thought of Christ ; love to God as the continent 
and representation of all good ; and love to the 
neighbor — the object and the field for the exploita- 
tion of those faculties and qualities which render 
life worth eternizing. He exemplified this in His 
own life. He gave His life. His whole being to His 
disciples "that He might take it again", enlarged 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 83 

and glorified through the fruits it should bring forth 
in them. It is he that keepeth his life in the little 
napkin of selfishness who loseth it. Garnered, not 
sown to become part of the social scheme, how can 
it enlarge, be enriched, as generous lives are en- 
riched, by all the wealth and fullness of the lives 
which their devotion has developed or redeemed? 
Multitudes of men and women have tasted the fruits 
of this devotion, in their families and in the circles 
in which they move, in educational, social, and 
missionary work, in the church and out of it. No 
age is without its examples. What may we not ex- 
pect when the Phillips Brookes tell us again that 
whosoever doeth the will of God, he is the child of 
God ; that it is the dogmatists who are the infidels, 
since their zeal for systems to help out the simple 
gospel emphasizes their ignorance of that gospel as 
the power of God to reclaim and exalt the race? 
What may we not expect in an age when the "Sun 
of Righteousness" is shining into the hearts of 
thousands who make no sign against the old scaf- 
foldings, but who, leaving these behind, quietly 
enter into the rest? What may we not expect when 
the old Scotch divines, so long the defenders par 
excellence of all the old dogmas, now boldly tell us 
that "the several propositions originally elaborated 
by Augustine, amended by the school- men of the 
middle ages, adopted wholesale by the Puritans — 
and dominating the Christian intellect for centuries, 
dominate it no longer"? When they tell us that 
"the three propositions^first, that righteousness is 



84 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

blessedness ; second, that there is a divine being 
who is seeking to make men sharers in his right- 
eousness ; third, that in the cravings of the human 
soul for communion with that power without it, 
which is the source of its being and the ground of 
its moral life, there is a pledge of its immortality", 
and that these are the thoughts which have taken 
the place of the old theories in the hearts of men ; 
the Fatherhood of God, the Blessedness of Right- 
eousness, the Immortality of the Soul. 

Returning from California with such fruits of his 
enterprise as made him reasonably solid among his 
fellows, and with such intellectual and spiritual ac- 
quirements as opportunities for solitude often bring 
to well constituted minds, Mr. Illoc found himself 
at an early age the father of three children and the 
foster father of two orphan sons o'f a sister. Our 
friend just passed away was one of the latter. 
These responsibilities increased his desire to obtain 
for their instruction a sure basis, founded in the 
real nature of men and their natural relations, 
social and spiritual. 

Familiar from childhood with the system of 
thought founded on the seemingly unnatural and 
forced relations of man to his Creator, through the 
interference of an inferior and baser nature in the 
person of a snake, making sin an accident unpro- 
vided for and so unhinging God's plans and pur- 
poses regarding man, and so affecting his disposi- 
tion toward man as eventually to render human sac- 
rifice and more than this necessary in a scheme to 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 85 

restore things statu quo^ "I naturally", said he, "fell 
into comparing these thoughts more definitely with 
the thoughts which reached me while reading the 
Word in my cabin, and which have ripened into 
convictions, as I have since mingled intimately 
with active human interests". 

Before giving his further reflections, however, 
permit me a further brief reference to his family. 
The transcendent qualities of our friend we all 
know. His brother occupies a similar position, and 
with equal credit, in a western state. Of the 
daughters, one was the efficient president of a lead- 
ing college for women, when she died, regretted by 
all good people. The other is the wife and efficient 
coadjutor of a wealthy and progressive business 
and Christian leader in a large western city. The 
son, after graduating at Yale, spent several years 
in German institutions, in traveling, to study sys- 
tems of thought and their fruits, then three years 
in mission work in the slums of New York City. 
With this preparation, he took charge of a small 
Congregational church in a city in the middle west. 
His society soon became four thousand strong and 
erected for themselves an elegant and commodious 
edifice, adapted to the beneficent work which they 
had. planned in the way of assisting to train prac- 
tical and efficient character. 

I hope some day to give a paper on the work of 
this high-purposed man. I hope to show what one 
man can do, has done, with a thoroughly disciplined 
mind, thoroughly schooled in the knowledge of the 



86 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

terrible fruits of sin in the hearts of men untrained 
to meet the temptations of a vigorous and absorbed 
age, as well as in the hearts of men who have found 
life a thankless gift under systems which teach that 
even the God who made them arbitrarily discrim- 
inates in favor of one and against another of His 
creatures who must still look life and eternity in 
the face ; men who look doAvn from this to them 
implacable face of God, into the face of fathers, 
brothers, neighbors, rendered, by a system of 
thought, as unpitying as their factitious Creator. 

If our hearer is not in sympathy with this ar- 
raignment, letdiim visit the cities of Scotland — Glas- 
gow, or better, Edinburgh, where there is less work 
to divert. Let him see about University Square the 
best specimens of humanity on earth, under the in- 
fluence of hope ; — the elect. Let him see between 
Holyrood and the Castle the most thriftless, de- 
graded, reckless, miserable, because most hopeless 
people on earth, — the consciously reprobate of a 
system taught for centuries. I have looked for 
years to see the practical, earnest minds of Scot- 
land, the first to logically and safely displace the 
old system by a more humane and godly system of 
thought. That day has come, and her sturdiest 
divines are engaged with avidity in this work, as a 
result of their observation of these sad fruits of their 
old system. 

This son had seen all this. He had seen, what 
was far worse, this same influence more attenuated, 
affect the whole mass of what is called Christian 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 87 

thought. He saw these views of God reconcile tne 
Christian world to the present conditions, as repre- 
sented inside of fashionable churches, where sweet 
music, elegant art and fascinating eloquence charm 
men, women and children into the kingdom ; and, 
also, as represented by larger hosts, who, even in 
this land, never see the inside of a church nor hear 
the voice of a charmer who charms that way. 

At his church, one day to enjoy this elegance, 
which was not scrimped, I saw him receive into his 
fold nine persons of one family, the father and all 
the sons and sons-in-law bearing evidence of more 
or less customary dissipation. "All converted at 
once"? "All have expressed a desire to be con- 
verted and were willing to come. We feel our 
position so strong now through a common under- 
standing of the nature of our work, that these can 
not hurt us. We shall do them good, probably save 
them. We helped them only a little, and almost 
without their knowing it, to make the appearance 
they thought necessary. If we save them, the in- 
vestment is at a thousand per cent. Then, too, this 
will have been but a beginning ; there are thou- 
sands to save". 

The society employs at least part of the time of 
several well-educated, trained assistants of each sex, 
who all work in their missions to induce persons of 
all classes to come eventually into the enjoyment of 
all the elevating and refining, as well as Christian- 
izing influences of the church, — its music, its ele- 
gance, its practical thought. Separate sessions are 



88 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

sometimes arranged for different classes wh.o can 
not attend the regular assemblies. *'This action", 
said he, "is the result of a 'New Birth' in our 
church. We have, indeed, learned that we are as 
yet, at least, never without the necessity for a new 
birth, or evolution into higher forms of religious 
thought and practice. But the spirit is always 
brooding, and we feel always confident of its guid- 
ance and help. The society is made up largely of 
practical people, the great body of whom have not 
belonged to other churches. They are ready to 
study God's word, and His promises as manifested 
in the results of social effort or neglect." 

"Men and women in our fold are studying differ- 
ent phases of religious thought", said Mr. I., 
"grouping themselves in sections for this purpose, 
but co-operating heartily in the great purposes of 
the society ; the building up of men and women 
into goodness, responsive to the ever urgent divine 
effort". 

I return to the interview. God had thus delivered 
unto us five children, said Mr. Illoc, senior, with 
what seemed to me and my wife reasonable de- 
mands, and with promises such as appeared to us 
to show His friendly interest in the children and in 
the parents to whom He gave them. They also 
seemed to show His friendly and just purpose to 
accompany His gifts with sympathizing guidance 
and assistance as well as with proper incitements, 
such as His fatherly concern for His creatures would 
dictate. And, while at a times we were not a little 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 89 

annoyed by their weakness and helplessness, and 
the absorbing care their condition occasioned, yet, 
as we thought further of it, we were beguiled into 
admiration of His wisdom in even this the manner 
of His gifts. Nay, our admiration kindled into 
rapture of worship, as we reflected how the great 
Creator of a race so richly endowed with possibili- 
ties, seems to have planned to share with men the 
glory of this creation and the joy of it. 

And thus we came to look upon the building of 
human character as the one thing most godly and 
godlike ; a privilege which thus gave to men, to us, 
the honor of co-partnership in the crowning opera- 
tion of God's crowning work. 

In further considering this work, which seemed 
to carry such responsibilities, and the promise of 
such joyful fruitage, w^e were led to study more 
earnestly the character of the work. We were first 
impressed with the fact that it had always been the 
subject of supreme divine regard. To maintain 
with absolute sacredness individual freedom, and a 
final sense of individual, parental and social responsi- 
bility, God had patiently permitted trillions upon 
trillions to press their own willful way to ruin, if 
peradventure, one, or further on, one community 
or people might gain these two ideas, if at length, 
after ages, these ideas might be fixed in the race. 

Getting at the foundation of our work then, we 
saw in the great moving world about us, the great 
cities with their wonderful and gigantic interests ; 
the wonderful buildings, machinery, public works, 



90 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

and great institutions required to meet the world- 
wide wants of a great civilized community, and of 
great nations and families of nations ; in the great 
ships and railroads and world-encircling systems of 
mail-service and telegraphs, to connect homes and 
cities and continents ; in these we saw the opera- 
tions of mighty human desires and purposes, capa- 
bilities and functions ; including eager, adventurous 
and far-reaching imaginations. 

For the accumulations of wealth necessary to the 
contrivance and creation of these great instru- 
mentalities, there must be great and almost savage 
cravings for wealth. For the accumulation of 
knowledge and skill and patience to construct these, 
bounding and bursting ambitions are necessary, and 
the development of god-like habits of perseverance, 
of heroic, sometimes reckless, daring and almost 
frenzied purpose, ready to tear down every opposing 
interest. These must be met by equal knowledge, 
skill, patience and daring to protect any one in- 
terest from other clashing interests. 

In the midst of all these ambitious, gigantic and 
absorbing activities, the world must be peopled, 
and domestic and social interests and interdepend- 
encies must be maintained, and to this end, social 
desires so strong that they can not be uprooted or 
dominated by other cyclonic influences, must have 
place in the human constitution. Each, then, 
miust, in a measure, and after a manner, have free- 
dom, and be set loose. 

This freedom implies that each of these human 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 91 

qualities may degenerate into a corresponding vice 
or passion. Cunning may become lying chichan- 
ery ; and experience shows that it is likely to do so, 
unless it is balanced wisely by some far-seeing pur- 
pose. Pure and reciprocally beneficent affection 
may, in the same way, degenerate into murderous, 
soul-destroying lust. Ambition may so set the 
soul on fire with a selfish purpose as to result in 
bloody tyranny. Purposeful desire for wealth may 
lash the soul into a fever of cruelty and oppression. 
Imagination may lead the soul away into weird and 
wicked machinations of evil, to ensnare men and 
women and sway them to wicked purposes. 

Yet all these conditions arise out of God's ex- 
pressed purposes. They are the more or less di- 
rect but perverted results of His fiats planted in the 
race by the primal order, "Multiply and replenish 
the earth, — subdue, have dominion", and of the 
social and conservative instincts which promote co- 
operation and organization among men. 

To meet and dominate the dangerous incidents of 
these necessary conditions of moral being, God has 
endowed the individual man with His own attri- 
butes of self activity. His own image, and has in- 
stilled such godly and humane purposes into the 
race as should dominate the activity of its faculties 
on the lower plane, but in consonance with their 
proper activity there. 

Just as vegetable life dominates chemication and 
gravitation in plants, without impeding the proper 
activities of these qualities ; as still higher life in 



92 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

animals dominates without destroying all activities 
below it. As reason dominates all these lower ac- 
tivities of life and matter, in consonance with their 
normal instincts and aptitudes, so, through the 
power of spiritual discernment, restored by the new 
birth, when lost or impaired, reason and all human 
aptitudes below it, are to be dominated, sanctified, 
incited to high use and efficiency by spirit discern- 
ment and spiritual aspirations, yet so as not to 
ignore their other lower uses and functions. The 
religious development of man was not intended to 
cripple him, but to perfect every part of him. 

How wise, then, that the child should not be 
sent into the world with all these capacities for 
efficient enterprise or for evil, thoroughly de- 
veloped, before the nature and purpose of these 
faculties can be understood, and their activities so 
wisely balanced, by training, one against another, 
and over against other interests of society, or can 
be so reinforced by religious influences nourishing 
high and hallowed purposes, as to secure the best 
results from them without very considerable evils. 
What folly, on the other hand, to think of a world 
so inane and negative as would be a race without 
the activity of these implanted possibilities and 
their necessary incidents? What work more pleas- 
ing to the imagination, gratifying to the ambition 
or enobling to the soul of a man or woman than 
that of co-operating with the ever-acting spirit and 
purpose of God to set in right paths creatures pos- 
sessed of such possibilities? How surely is a 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 93 

father thus glorified in his son? How surely is 
The Father of us all glorified in his children? 
And how else can our Heavenly Father be glorified 
by the moral universe? 

Yet, instead, what is the usual teaching? The 
first movement of the child mind is desire, for 
sugar, say. It stretches forth the hand, obtains it. 
Repeats this. The tenth time it fails. Cries, ob- 
tains it. Repeats this. The next day feels pain ; 
says so and obtains other goodies. The next day 
feigns pain and secures still more desirable goodies. 
Repeats this indefinitely, and thus by the inadvert- 
ent help of the mother or of hired help, or other 
associates, learns to lie, along the exercise of its 
knowledge of the law of cause and effect alone. It 
not having been taught to classify causes as legiti- 
mate and illegitimate, as moral and immoral efi'ort, 
a habit of success through improper methods has 
been established. It seems to him easy and not 
undesirable to succeed thus. The practice enlarges, 
reaches all the child's interests. God is now 
charged with having blasted the nature of the 
child with total depravity ; witnessed by a sinister 
mistranslation of Gen. iii, 16, and the historic un- 
truth that thorns and thistles were created and 
snakes made to crawl on their bellies, then for the 
first time, to commemorate this relentlessly cruel 
infliction on an innocent babe, created in the image 
of God, with the necessary capacity to choose. 
(We do not here discuss the matter of heredity, but 



94 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

only of divinely imposed guilt and corruption of 
the nature of children.) 

One of the happiest and wisest characteristics of 
civilized life, to further exemplify what has been 
said, is the generous and provident aspiration of the 
individual to secure comforts, a home, the means of 
rendering a home pleasing, edifying, cultivating to 
one's self and family, and attractive and pleasant to 
neighbors. But for this active individuality civil- 
ized society would have no form or place. Our 
beautiful American homes, hamlets, villages, and 
cities, our civilization and culture owe their exist- 
ence to the activity of this human desire. But how 
easily, without instruction and discipline, this desire 
becomes so absorbing as to shut out all sympathy or 
consideration for the deprivations and sufferings of 
others, even to lead to injustice and dishonesty. 

An active public sentiment, alert to oppose social 
aberrations and to maintain a proper standard and 
condition of social virtue and propriety, are as nec- 
essary to the well being of society as are laws against 
theft. But how often is this virtuous sentiment de- 
graded into a weak and cruelly wicked disposition 
to spy and gossip, and to construe any thoughtless 
but innocent look or word into grounds for the rep- 
robation or banishment of persons whom a correc- 
tive suggestion might have saved. 

And yet we are told that it is one of the "mysteries 
of godliness that sin should have been brought into 
the world". As well talk of heat without the pos- 
sibility of cold ; of light without the possibility of 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 95 

its opposite, darkness ; of knowledge without the 
possibility of ignorance. This peculiar constitution 
of the race is plainly the necessary condition of 
moral being or of enterprising being. God pro- 
nounced it good, and angels echoed His judgment 
of it. 

Yet, for some reason, the same possibilities which 
are to-day becoming acting realities, have slept in 
the race for all ages, just as coal slept in the 
mountains unused, and as electricity has sported 
idly from cloud to crag without apparent purpose 
or use. 

I am no saint to claim the right to arraign the 
purposes of other men. Nor is it necessary, in 
stating reasons for existing conditions, to impugn 
the motives, more especially of those who have not 
manifestly shown continued dispositions to take sel- 
fish and cruel advantage of human weaknesses or of 
tendencies to slip easily into specially devised or ac- 
cidentally developed schemes. 

In conducting the education of our children, how- 
ever, it has seemed necessary to discuss, so as, if 
possible, to modify, tendencies which have hereto- 
fore resulted in wide-sweeping evil, and in the 
notably slow and fitful progress toward the realiza- 
tion of the plausible ideas sprung by Christ and 
His immediate helpers. Without assuming to 
think for others, we recognize the injunction, also, 
"Work out your own salvation, for God worketh in 
2/ott" to this end as well as in your teachers. And, 
again, "Every man shall give account for himself.''' 



96 CHAHACTER NOT CREEDS. 

So we have been led to study this subject for our- 
selves, and as we have proceeded in it, it has come 
to seem to us one of the most beautiful things of 
God's providences, these seemingly studied out pro- 
visions for the employment of human faculties in 
activities at once interesting, pleasing and pro- 
motive of manly growth as well as of social progress 
and good. 

In looking for the reasons for this long infertility 
of the social nature of man, then, we are convinced 
that human nature maintains its characteristics 
and that each man and each age is, in some 
measure, traced in the vicissitudes of history. So 
it is to be expected that the reason for the tardy 
development of the fertile activities and of the 
inventive and creative fecundity, which are be- 
coming so manifest now, will lie in the implanted 
characteristics of the race, and in no fitful judg- 
ment of a God clothed by passionate men with like 
passions with themselves. The words of a dis- 
tinguished prophet may direct us, "All we have 
gone astray as sheep do". And how is that? 
Why, a bell-wether jumps a fence ; the gregarious 
instinct governs sheep, and all the flock, without 
individual thought or capacity for thought, follow. 

The human attribute corresponding to the gre- 
garious character in sheep is the social instinct. 
Men must be so made as to tend toward each 
other not through argument and reason alone, but 
through an instinct, also, which acts more quickly 
than reason. This quality is healthful and civiliz- 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 97 

ing when properly developed and directed. It 
finds its proper life in reciprocity, contributions 
and sharings. This idea has been met on other 
occasions in our discussions and is likely to be 
often met, since it conveys the gist of the Christly 
plan of social life. The individual "lays down his 
mite, his life, and takes it again a hundred fold" 
enlarged by the surrender. His contribution has 
become a constituent part of the general wealth, all 
of which becomes his in a very real sense in virtue 
of his contribution of an essential, and, without 
him, a wanting element. His specific skill has 
fashioned the instrument with which a Mozart or 
a Paganini may charm the world, and without 
which their transcendent genius would have failed 
of its mission. To the whole community and to 
each man of it has been added a hundred fold of 
wealth by this contribution. 

But this wonderful capacity for reciprocal bless- 
ing may, by a suspension of the process of develop- 
ment, never leave the stage in which it knows only 
to draw from the mother or from society, without 
return, especially of intellectual and spiritual pab- 
ulum. Thus through the ages, uninstructed and 
thoughtless, the race has been, and still is, made 
up, as to the great body of it, of gregarious and 
cliental herds, not of reciprocally helpful elements. 
Tyrants have found their opportunity in this in- 
stinct of gregariousness on its lowest planes, to 
mislead and degrade their fellows. Religious lead- 
ers have found it easier to lead men as herds than 



98 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

to continue Christ's kindly effort to develop the re- 
ciprocal virtues of the social state. They find it 
only necessary to jump a fence, make a demonstra- 
tion — Islamism, Monasticism, the Crusades, Cal- 
vinism, Mormonism, Lutheranism, Immersionism — 
the following comes with little effort, especially so 
long as an act of faith or the submission to a rite 
suffices to secure immunity from deserved punish- 
ment, or to gain some object of desire. Nor is it 
long until the votaries of a dogma require no other 
evidence to hold them than the age of their creed 
or the number of its adherents. The sense of in- 
dividual responsibility and social interests is lost in 
an hereditary condition of servility, self-distrust and 
self-abandon. 

Balzac, in his "Medecin de Campagne", describes 
the result of this teaching in a community where 
superstitious ignorance, actively engendered in the 
name of religion, led them to rejoice in filth and 
disease and in the care and suffering these occa- 
sioned. A condition as terrible and heartless as 
that in which the system of caste in India leaves 
men, was the result. The only purpose of our 
earthly life, as men were taught in the name of 
that Christ who cleansed the lepers, healed the sick 
and fed the multitudes, before He spoke to them of 
heavenly things, was to furnish occasion for the 
suffering which was to purchase heaven — whatever 
the nature of that place might be for such beings. 
This leadership wholly ignored qualification for 
heaven. That would sound the death-knell to spir- 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 99 

itual tyranny, by promoting manly thought and a 
manly sense of worth in the sight of God. 

Peter the Hermit jumped another fence. Princes 
and people of what was then known as Christian 
civilization crowded after him in crazy crusades. 
They were taught that heaven was to be the reward 
for the slow death that came to them through star- 
vation, far from home — a name these religious 
leaders trampled in the dust. Kings and prelates 
were permitted to exercise the ''divine right" to 
dispose of the bodies and souls of men often better 
endowed than themselves, as well as of the wholly 
unconsidered mass. 

Thus led for centuries by the bell-wethers of hu- 
manity, until all sense of personal worth and 
power was well nigh lost, it was a relief to the 
imagination, if not to the reason and judgment of 
some of these men, to learn, at length, that this 
terrible God "had, before the foundations of the 
world were laid, formed an everlasting purpose 
whereby He decreed by his counsels secret to us, to 
deliver from this death and damnation those whom 
He hath chosen out of mankind, and to bring 
them by Christ to everlasting salvation" (not by 
any betterment of their earthly condition or of 
their character), "but only by the merits and the 
sacrificial, expiatory blood of our Lord and Savior 
Jesus Christ", appropriated by faith; i. e., by 
"crying Lord, Lord", and not through "doing the 
will of My Father who is in heaven". Through 
discovery or invention by a new leader, a scrimpy 



100 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

few could come into such relations to God by "faith 
and baptism", that "there could be no condemna- 
tion for them", and that their "lust and concupis- 
cence were no longer to be counted as sin, but only 
of the nature of sin". (See Article IX and Cate- 
chism, still printed as the Standards of Faith.) 

Many of these poor, uncared for, hopeless ones 
grasped at even this, and by their numbers gave 
such respectability to this dogma as launched it on 
the then sluggish stream of popular thought. Men 
were thus taught that even the development and ex- 
ercise of their original, heaven-implanted faculties 
and sympathies, under the urgent divine influences, 
must necessarily lead to sin, by making them 
wickedly proud. * 'Not by our works or deserving' ' . 
Why not? For fear of promoting pride and con- 
tempt of our fellows, when the very work recom- 
mended is the development and exercise of reason- 
able sympathy for our fellowmen, and the striving 
to lift the plane of life on which all stand ; when 
the very effort of religion was to teach that salva- 
tion was a condition of the soul to be attained by 
personal effort and godly help, and not a reward of 
any body's merit. 

So taught and led, so they did, and character- 
building, social enlightenment became an incident 
of earthly callings and ambitions, not of religious 
aspiration, either spontaneous or inculcated. 

Within the year the reading world have seen an 
ex cathedra answer to the aspiring spirit of the age. 
"Why, these advancing people will soon be asking 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 101 

US to believe and teach that 'God's chief end is to 
glorify man.' " Precisely so, my dear doctor of 
divinity, and so it is your chief end to glorify man, 
since only so can you possibly glorify God. In 
doing so you will follow God's constantly expressed 
purpose. Our only wonder is that you doctors 
have not found it out before. Men have come at 
length to learn that with wise and benevolent in- 
tent, God created man at the first with the attributes 
of a moral being — divine attributes — in His own 
image. They see no reason to think that He has 
ever ceased to be chiefly anxious to render this His 
image and likeness more and more glorious. As 
He is Himself perfect and all glorious, nothing 
which His creatures can do can render Him more 
so. His chief concern, then, must be to fill the 
earth as well as His heaven with like glory, by the 
perfection and glorification of the moral being 
which He has made susceptible of this exaltation. 
In this work He has to crave, and does crave and 
demand the sympathy and co-operation of men 
whom He has endowed with freedom, a dangerous 
attribute, yet one essential to the very definition of 
moral being. He often expresses His infinite ab- 
horrence of sin, both in word and more emphatic- 
ally by painting that abhorrence in the counte- 
nances and in the condition and manifest destiny 
of men who turn a deaf ear to His requirements. 
This is an irrevocable incident of His law, the 
moral law. He thus also shows His interest in the 
glorification of man. 



102 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Foolish men often seek to aggrandize themselves 
by pushing others down, thus giving themselves 
relative superiority. But relative superiority may 
be attained on a very low plane. The wise seek to 
lift themselves by lifting their fellows, and thus 
the plane on which all stand. Thus God, "As I 
live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death 
of the wicked, but that he turn from his wicked- 
ness and live". The proudest title of the true 
Christian is that of "co-worker with God". "My 
Father worketh hitherto, and I work". "Thou in 
Me, and I in them that we may he glorified together'' \ 
"That we may be one". "God so loved the world 
that He gave Himself in giving His Son, that who- 
soever belie veth on Him might not perish, but 
have everlasting life". "Herein is My Father 
glorified that ye bear much fruit." 

This seeking the glory of God through the glorifi- 
cation of men was a leading feature of Christ's 
plan. It was one of the fruits of His lips which 
evidenced His divinity, and the clearer this is made 
to appear, the more tenaciously and reverently will 
a true manhood hold to Him as a divine leader and 
teacher of men. It is thus the highest office of 
moral being to promote the good of moral being. 
This was conspicuously the teaching of the great 
lawyer and preacher Finney, also of Spurgeon. 
David said, "Though I descend into hell, thou art 
there". And Theophilus Parsons, a great lawyer, 
chief-justice of a great state, aind dean of Harvard 
law school, tells us that God is in all the universe, 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 103 

including the hells, only as love, and to assuage 
misery as the result of sin, by restraining even the 
devils from bringing on themselves greater degrada- 
tion, evil and suffering. Thus it is the effort of 
God to lift up, not to depress, to glorify, and not to 
blast. This is also the dictate of philosophy. 
Homer, indeed all great teachers, like Christ, in- 
culcated this thought. For cruel ages has the op- 
posite teaching caused the race to grope in unam- 
bitious activities. Saved by faith, not in ourselves as 
born in the image of God, the constant objects of 
divine spiritual interest and urgency, but faith in 
whatever mistaken ideal is taught by the church, 
that is, by its sacerdotal leaders. 

I have said enough to indicate the general senti- 
ments which have governed us in our efforts to as- 
sist our children to build effectively useful lives. 
Never doubting God's infinitely tender interest in 
our efforts, we have never for an instant lacked 
faith in the success of these efforts. 

It would be blasphemy to suppress our sense of 
comfort and joy in this success, as we have all 
along felt a quiet and supreme enjoyment in the 
privilege of conscious active co-partnership with 
the urgent activities of eternally creative love. Our 
joy in our success is thus a joy of worship and 
praise for genuine and not stinted good, through 
the genuine and not stinted activities of the ever- 
urgent Father-love. 

Thus ended the interview, said the lawyer, which 
has given me great confidence regarding the effort 



104 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

we are making to build human character. The 
conviction becomes stronger and stronger that this 
is the one tangible effort a human being may make 
to "glorify God". The full and unstinted joy 
these people, now hale and clear of mind, at ninety, 
feel in the fruitage of their children's lives, points 
to it as, at the least, one fruitful way to provide 
for "enjoying Him forever". 

God gave us one, two, three, four, five ; 
With wondrous aptitudes alive. 
When seated 'round the board, we seven. 
Our home seems charged with bhss of heaven. 

Inspired with ardor, every one. 
For work and life-ful, healthful fun; 
Inspired to know, to grow, to sway, 
They tax our wit to lead the way. 

Between these babes and giant men 
Who do God's work with tongue and pen, 
Who build and weave, who sow and reap, 
Why long the road ? Why often steep ? 

For God is love and still contrives 
To fill with heaven our earthly lives. 
He knows the joy of building, doing, 
High purposes of good pursuing. 

Unselfish in His grand design, 
He shares with men this work divine. 
Mortals the bliss of heaven attain. 
Joining with God in building men. 



But years have brought us empty rooms? 
We long for glow which never comes? 



THE MAN WITH FIVE TALENTS. 105 

Nay, look again. God's wonders move ; 
Thousands sing gladder for their love. 

Thousands of homes and hamlets glow, 
Which late were dark with vice and woe. 
And some have gone to their reward. 
For work and fruit we thank Thee, Lord. 



106 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 



CHAPTER YI. 

PAPER OP DR. PRINCE, ALIAS "THE PERSIAN PRINCB'*. 

ThorougMy educated at home, he becomes a physician here. — 
Odd experience with current Christianity. — Learns its intrin- 
sic excellence and heartily adopts it by exclusive study of the 
four Gospels. — Gives intelligent reasons, after forty years, for 
its superficial influence, the growth of "infidelity", the insig- 
nificant results of missionary effort. 

The doctor was an Asiatic Prince. Beyond this 
he never revealed his nativity, which we conject- 
ured to be Persia. Owing to his being compli- 
cated with his elder brothers in a rebellion, he, in 
the forties, fled to America. Being a thoroughly 
educated physican in his native land, after some 
three years of poverty here he studied medicine and 
practiced. Then came a fortune of one hundred 
thousand dollars from his estates. Long after this 
he became interested in our manufacturing inter- 
ests, settled and invested among us. 

An unusual number had assembled in the large 
auditorium which the city and county, largely 
through the interest in the purposes of the club, 
had by this time erected near the reservoir park. 
The reservoir was a beautiful lake of one hundred 
acres, now supplying the city and vicinity with water 
for power and other uses. It was surrounded on 
three sides by rocky banks and bowlder strewn 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 107 

slopes, and was constructed by damming a valley, 
by means of such excavations as developed pictu- 
resque cliffs and headlands. A park of two hundred 
acres extended from it into the city. The reservoir 
is filled by a service canal, three miles in length, 
skillfully engineered from a simple dam in La 
Petite Riviere. 

The doctor was well along in his paper when I 
arrived. My father, said he, was governor of a dis- 
tant province, and we had never heard the mission- 
aries. An older brother traveled much, and by cor- 
respondence and reading knew something of relig- 
ious and political systems in the West. We also 
knew much of paganism by business contact and 
by study, and were impressed with its ruinous 
effects on the individual and national character. 
Neither a man nor a people, thought my father and 
brother, who can have the remorse or other painful 
consequences of sin removed by formal expiations 
or imagined transfers of taint to an animal, or to 
another person, can be a strong character in virtue 
of his religion. By this interception of the law of 
cause and effect all motive toward virtue is removed 
from by far the greater number of minds. On the 
other hand. Homer (for we also read Homer) , 
showed the Greeks how their ancestors were helped 
by the co-operation of the gods in their behalf, and 
what heroes this sympathy and active support made 
of them. Indeed, said he, the whole pagan system 
is effete in the minds of all thinking people among 
us. It is only maintained because of the impossi- 



108 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

bility of resisting the influence of bullet-headed 
priests, who, to live off the sacrifices, control the 
people. 

Our interest in this subject was strengthened 
by my brother's correspondence with Israelites in 
America, who had relatives in our country. I have 
since learned that his personal correspondent was of 
the reformed, or progressive class. At all events, 
this correspondent announced that "We, the Jews, 
recognize progress in thought and systems of 
thought ; that revelation is persistent and pro- 
gressive with the condition and needs of the peo- 
ple. Schooled in the symbolisms of the infantile 
periods of the race, which symbolisms, largely 
through the selfish cunning of the priests, became 
the innocent origin of sacrificial practices, in the 
early history of our people, it was natural that these 
practices should protrude themselves into the times 
when much better ideas prevail among the thinking 
classes. Thus David, Isaiah, Malachi, Jeremiah, 
preached against ^disobedience, lying, covetous- 
ness', not against omitting the sacrifice, but against 
the 'building of high places to burn their sons and 
daughters in the fire, which I commanded them not, 
neither came it into my mind'. They tried, in 
those old days, to show the people that God can not 
*delight in sacrifices', as is proven by hundreds of 
passages in the scriptures". 

These ideas led to very warm sympathy on our 
part with the Western thought. We imagined it 
to be the sentiment of the masses of Western people, 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 109 

for we knew little of the Christian doctrine either in 
its true or its perverted form. What, then, was our 
astonishment on hearing our brother's report of the 
discourse of a Christian missionary. 

"Owing to his imperfect use of the language he 
attempted to speak", said our brother, "I did not, 
perha^Ds, come to a full knowledge of what he meant 
to say. I can best convey my impression of his 
story by the simple mnemonic form in which, 
according to my custom, I stored it in my mind : 

"In a far distant country lived a great king, who 
had ten sons. Nine of these rebelled, alienating 
themselves more or less from the father's precepts, 
commands and interests. But afterward three of 
these sought to return, repentant, pleading, and de- 
sirous of being reconciled to the father and his gov- 
ernment. They, however, met some of the six, who 
assumed to know their father's disposition in the 
matter. These said to the three, 'Our father is ex- 
ceeding wroth. He will in no wise receive you or 
permit you to return. Besides his personal feeling 
in the matter, he has, as you know, a parchment of 
principles, a law, said to be an infinite law, and 
which he esteems more highly than he does himself 
or the sentient beings for whom the law was made. 
Now, as we understand it, you have violated this 
infinite law. The consequences are infinite. You 
have, therefore, incurred an infinite penalty. You 
are finite. Your punishment, whatever that may 
be, must, therefore, endure through an infinity of 
time. In no way am I willing', says he, 'in view of 



110 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

the personal affront, nor able, in view of the still 
greater fact of this violation of an infinite law, to 
receive you unless the tenth son, who remained 
loyal, and is innocent of any transgression, will de- 
liver himself up to the wickedest of the nine to be 
a more than human, a royal sacrifice. In no other 
way am I willing or able to restore you to favor'. 

"Perplexed by this statement, the three, in de- 
spair, looked about them, and behold, the tenth son 
had delivered himself into the hands of the wicked- 
est two of the nine, who in anger hung him on a 
tree by driving spikes through his hands and feet. 
The three then lifted up their eyes and saw that 
their father was looking on, well pleased with this 
sacrifice, and was willing to receive and pardon 
them. The tenth son, in virtue of his royalty, had 
borne the full penalty of the whole transgression". 

Well, the story was so unreasonable and unlikely 
that it made little impression on our minds, and 
soon became to us a mere myth, a legend. I came 
to America without thinking of it. Being destitute 
I attached myself, as some of you know, in the ca- 
pacity of half servant and half friend, to a gifted 
but dissipated young man, the son of a noted Amer- 
ican statesman. We became very close friends, 
though his dissipation continued contrary to my 
customs entirely. Finally, after a prolonged de- 
bauch, the youth came to himself and determined 
to reform, but seemed greatly troubled about some- 
thing. "The only way back to the respectable po- 
sition in society which my people have won and 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. Ill 

held, is by becoming reconciled to my father and 
his family. But I have so alienated myself from 
them and disgraced the fairest of American names, 
that my father can not receive me, nor ask my 
brothers and sisters to do so". 

Then my brother's story came to mind as to the 
peculiar belief that these Christian people entertain ; 
a belief the more strange to me the more I thought 
of it, and yet, under its influence, I went to the 
father and told him all the circumstances. I also 
told him that I had just received a valuable estate, 
that I had purchased a beautiful home near the 
city, and that I should be glad to give this home to 
him as the dower of a daughter about to be mar- 
ried, provided he would receive the repentant son 
into the bosom of his family. The scar on my face 
is the result of this offer. When I came to my 
senses after the blow, he was recounting to a few 
neighbors, whom the incident had called together, 
*'the insult I had offered his manhood". "Why", 
said he, "the fellow knew that I was the father of 
that boy, and that any father on earth would give 
all he had or expected to have to win the erring son 
from his wanderings ; nay, would help him with all 
the strength of his manhood, with his godhood, if 
he possessed it, to return". Turning to me he said, 
"Don't you know any thing about our blessed 
Christianity? Have you never read its story of the 
prodigal son, or how God, the model Father of us 
all, so loved the human race that He sent His Son 
to win them back to good and Heaven"? I had to 



112 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

acknowledge that, .so far from having such ideas of 
Christianity, I had acted on what I had supposed 
was good authority for a diametrically opposite 
thought regarding it. 

When I afterwards related to the father the in- 
cident I have recited above, we became warm 
friends. He accepted my explanation and apology, 
and "no longer wondered", as he said, "that Chris- 
tianity, so presented, made so little progress in its 
own or other lands, especially in foreign lands, 
where its acceptance must result from thought and 
conviction, and not from authority, fashion, or 
sympathy". He then advised me to read, first of 
all, — and in my condition to read nothing else on the 
subject, — the four gospels thoroughly. This I did, 
reading, besides this in the Bible, only occasionally 
in the psalms and the prophets. I of course read 
it in the Greek, as, in the university at home, our 
knowledge of the Greek was very intimate. Here 
I found absolutely nothing to support the views my 
brother recited from the missionary's discourse. I 
found, instead, an effort every- where to create an 
impression of helpfulness on the part of God ; of 
anxious, tender solicitude for the return of all 
prodigals, and of readiness and yearning anxiety 
to pardon every person penitent ; that is, showing 
a disposition to "turn from his wickedness and do 
that which is righteous" ; thus putting himself in 
the condition required by God and all reason to be 
forgiven, and restored to a relation of intimate sym- 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 113 

pathy with God's effort to help him and keep him 
from further degradation. 

I then read the Epistle of James and those of John, 
with the same result. I then ventured upon the He- 
brews. Here I found occasion to study some pas- 
sages. I did this under the governing influence of 
the thoughts I had gained from an intimate sym- 
pathy with Christ's words and acts. Reading 
further, I found Paul a learned Jew, but familiar 
with the thought of all the nations, and disposed to 
approach his argument from their respective stand- 
points. Earnest and strong as were his convictions 
of the superiority of Christianity, with its inward 
workings and transforming power as compared with 
any other system, still his whole being had been im- 
pregnated with Judaism and with intense sympathy 
with the Jewish habit of thought, which, as script- 
ure every-where represents, always inclined to idola- 
try, — to paganism. Reading his arguments made 
from their point of view, if, indeed, Paul wrote the 
Hebrews, which scholars question, a person unfa- 
miliar with Christ's elucidation of His own system, 
or having a profounder sympathy with Paul's learn- 
ing than with Christ's consciousness as the Truth, 
the Way and the Life, might be tempted to follow 
some of the hundred "systems of faith" which 
have been based on Paul's ad hominems and illustra- 
tions. 

Meanwhile, I think that Christianity, as pre- 
sented by Christ Himself, is adapted to supplant 
paganism, and that it will do so as rapidly as can be 



114 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

expected, considering the tendency of the human 
mind to conservatism and indifference. It will 
not do so as a variation of pagan systems of 
expiation. 

As I read Paul only with the purpose of holding 
my mind still to the subject of Christ's thought, 
instead of being bent on finding matter with which 
to reconcile the new religion with the old, formal 
religions, as seems to be the sacerdotal habit, I 
found noble inspirations in his thought. Nothing 
in literature surpasses the fervor of his convictions 
of the superiority of the Christian system, its 
perfectness as "the power of God to salvation". 

And does not the Christian religion stand worth- 
ily on its own foundation of God's loving interest 
in man, and without the support of a system repre- 
senting only the progress of a people out of the 
paganism with which it was surrounded and with 
which it had been stained through and through? 
Having the gospels, do we need to search the old 
scriptures for evidence that Christ's words and life 
represent God's thought and anxious love for men, 
who, without this interest, are likely to work their 
way to ruin? 

All concede that the old system was so imperfect 
and incomplete in some way as to require a new 
system, at an enormous expense of suffering and 
labor. The expectation that a Savior would come 
was common in the Hebrew mind. In the expres- 
sion of this hope, it was to be expected that, to 
some extent, the mental state of the speakers should 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 115 

be mirrored, as Paul's early predilections are some- 
times mirrored in his vehement efforts to convince. 
When dangers threatened the nation they loved, 
they looked for a Messiah to be a leader, a king to 
deliver them. When remorse for sin oppressed 
them, they expressed their hope for a Messiah who 
should ease their consciences by a sacrifice more 
effective for the purpose than the sacrifices which 
were offered for them daily. Paul knew and sym- 
pathised with this feeling. His arguments, espe- 
cially in his fervent efforts to illustrate his thought, 
often bore the coloring of this Jewish view — hu- 
mored it, perhaps. 

These groveling ideas, as is shown by the inspired 
words of their prophets, were of the imperfections 
of their system, and of the low plane on which 
their system stood, as represented in the common 
Jewish mind. When the Christ came, what of 
these preconceptions ? Did He encourage the desire 
to make Him a temporal king? Did He anywhere, 
in response to the other vision, represent Himself 
as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of *'Our Father 
who art in heaven" ; of "My Father, who worketh 
hitherto and I work" ; who *'So loved the w^orld 
that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever 
believeth in Him might not perish, but have ever- 
lasting life"? 

He proposed to relieve men of sin and the fur- 
ther consequences of sin, but by inducing them 
and helping them to "Go and sin no more", to 
* * Strive to enter in at the straight gate " . " Sell that 



116 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have 
treasure in heaven". *'He that heareth my words 
and doeth them". When John sought proof of 
Christ's identity as the Son of God, "Tell him lep- 
ers are cleansed, sick are healed, to the poor the 
gospel is preached". "By these my works ye may 
know me, as my followers are to be known in their 
own consciousness and by the world, by the fruits 
they shall bear through the work I am come to do 
in and for them". From this beneficent plane 
shall we drag His thought down to the crudest, 
crudest thought of the old system, which His came 
to supersede? 

I should feel called upon to apologize to this in- 
telligent audience for dwelling longer on a thought 
which to such multitudes is entirely effete, had I 
not within a month read, in the organ of a leading 
denomination, which organ belabors the people for 
their "increasing tendency to infidelity", and yet 
publishes, as orthodoxy par excellence, a series of 
articles entitled "The Atonement, in Five Parts". 
Thus: "Jesus stood between God and the sinner 
and so made peace ; but He did not compromise 
the matter (whatever is meant by this), by asking 
forbearance on the part of God, and repentance 
and change of conduct on the part of the sinner. 
No, no, no. He faced the wrath of God justly due 
the sinner, He suffered in His own person the pen- 
alty due us ; thus vindicating the righteousness of 
the law" (And what in the name of theology, 
even, does he mean by this, in these days? Is 



PAPER OF BR. PRINCE. 117 

God's law of love, justice and riglit of such doubt- 
ful character that it needs vindication to its author, 
or to men?), "and amply satisfying its demands." 
In a mountain feud we might find use for this last 
form of expression. For example, one man kills 
another ; we can not find the murderer, so we kill 
his brother, and a brutal family express themselves 
as "satisfied". Does the common law? Is God in 
the place of this family, that His wrath must be so 
satisfied? "But while we. Baptists, believe this, 
there are evangelical (?) Christians seeking fellow- 
ship with us, who teach rank heresy, holding that 
Christ's work was unnecessary". This statement 
is without the least foundation in fact, and might 
be called malicious, were it certain that its writer 
was able to appreciate the higher nature op the 
WORK which "evangelicals", with an"?", "teach- 
ers of heresy" without the "?", ascribe to the 
Savior of the world. 

But to throw light on the associations from which 
this un-heretical author derives his terms and his 
notions of Christianity, note that a few lines farther 
on, he bases his whole scheme on the concensus of 
pagan nations in a scheme of salvation which the 
best thought of pagan lands rejects, just as the 
prophets rejected it centuries ago, and their people 
later. To prove the necessity of a more than hu- 
man "sacrifice to appease the Father's wrath", he 
quotes the ' 'practices of pagan nations all over the 
world". "Hence", says he, "in every land are 
found costly temples, and burning altars, and vie- 



118 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

tims of sacrifice, all devoted to the one idea of ap- 
pcasing the Divine wrath". And this appeasing the 
Divine wrath he makes a corner-stone in the Chris- 
tian scheme, because it is a corner-stone in the pa- 
gan scheme. And yet he has just quoted Paul as 
saying that "God was in Christ reconciling the 
world to Himself, not counting their trespasses unto 
them". He had no doubt also seen Paul's quota- 
tion, Heb. X, "In offerings for sin thou hast no 
pleasure. Lo, I come to do thy will, God". 
"This is the covenant which I will make with 
them, I will put my laws in their hearts, and their 
sins and their iniquities will I remember no more ' ' . 

Yet in spite of such Scripture assertions by the 
hundreds, to this author, the obstacle to salvation, 
ever since the "Fall", is not in men, but in God. 
He, the Deity, is the object of effort on the part of 
Deity, since "I and my Father are one". God's 
state of mind being changed by the sacrifice of His 
Son, the work of salvation is accomplished (for an 
elected few, in the mind of this Calvinist, for all 
mankind, more logically from the premises, in the 
mind of Plosea Ballou, the father of Universal- 
ism). 

I confess that to me, who was led so early to 
study Christianity from the New Testament alone, 
these views fully account for the much bewailed 
"waxing of infidelity", and for the fact that, in 
1895, three thousand churches of a single branch 
of the Calvinist faith had no accessions of mem- 
bership. 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 119 

That all tliis which this man mixes up with much 
manifest truth, is utterly foreign to Christianity and 
to the dictates of the common sense of the civilized 
and enlightened people who have possessed an open 
Bible, have believed in Christ as a friend and sav- 
ior, and in God as a loving and wise father, can be 
shown in many ways. I give one illustrative in- 
cident. 

When this same sermon was repeated in Colum- 
bus, Ohio, for the thousandth time there, and at 
the time of the constitutional convention, in 1850, 
Hons. Thomas Ewing and Samuel T. Worcester 
(American readers do not need to be told who these 
men were) , heard the flippant recital of the firstly 
and secondly of this invention of pagan priests, 
adopted by Romish rhetoricians, and when, finally, 
the question came, "How then shall man be restored", 
etc., Mr. Ewing whispered loud enough to be heard 
by several persons, "Samuel, tell him to insert a 
pardoning clause in the Constitution^ \ And this, as 
we are finding, expresses the sense, not of pagans, 
taught and led by cunning and crafty priests, but 
of civilized men, who have read for themselves God's 
thoughts after Him, both in His revealed truth and 
in that in-born sense of equity between moral 
beings, which constitutes an essential element of 
moral being ; which Paul declares to be universally 
and reliably in the hearts of men ; to which God ap- 
peals in all His communications with men ; to which 
we all appeal in social life, in club and court room. 
It also expresses the sense of every page of Holy 



120 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Writ, from Genesis to Revelation. "Forgive our tres- 
passes as we forgive". "As I live, saitli the Lord, 
I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but 
that he turn from his wickedness and live". These 
and a thousand more pardoning clauses. 

For myself, not reared from childhood in these 
methods of thought, I can, perhaps, better sympathize 
with those in like condition than Christian people 
can do. My correspondence and intercourse with 
non-Christian people convince me that it is next to 
impossible for Christians to appreciate the difficulty 
a pagan encounters in approaching Christianity as 
ordinarily presented. The peculiar nature of the 
tri-personality of God is absolutely unthinkable by 
them. When I read Dr. Taylor's reputed illustra- 
tion of the Trinity to his students, I could go no 
further. "Imagine", says he, "three distinct ob- 
jects, like these fingers. These you comprehend. 
Now believe them to be so united as to become one 
while they still are three. As to the manner or 
means of accomplishing this, that is to be taken by 
faith. Thus the doctrine of the tri-unity is to be 
received by faith". I' could not do it. Pagans can 
not do it, since they have not, from childhood, prac- 
ticed on the noted humorist's definition of faith : 
"Belief in what you know is not true". 

Happily for me the difficulty was removed, as it 
can not be in all cases with other non-Christians. 
By a philosophy with which I have been long famil- 
iar, I recognize a trinity in all things, in God as 
well. This is not a trinity of persons, nor do the 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 121 

Christian scriptures speak of "three persons in the 
one God", nor do Quakers, nor "New Church" 
people, the Swedenborgians, and many others who 
possess most enlightened views. 

Let me try to illustrate the view of some of 
these. Of the astronomer's sun I know little. But 
besides the astronomer's sun there is a manifesta- 
tion of that sun of which I know much more ; the 
light proceeding from it, beautifying, cheering the 
worlds and at the same time making known to all 
intelligences the existence of that central orb. But 
besides this manifestation, though in a sense part 
and parcel of it, perhaps, there is a proceeding 
force constantly acting on every atom of matter in 
the solar system, producing warmth, energy, pro- 
moting animal and vegetable life, helping the 
world in every way. This is not two suns, not 
three, but one, triune, a trinity. 

I also know next to nothing of the gardener's 
roses. I can not improve them, not even propagate 
them. Yet in a broad sense I know a rose, through 
a subtle effluence of beautiful colors, through its 
fragrance also, acting on my nerve ; both these 
manifesting the existence of the rose and contribu- 
ting to my happiness. These are not three roses, 
but one, though a trinity or more in itself. 

So men pass my house, mere things to me ; no 
interest is stirred in me by their passing. But I 
enter my home, men and women are there, old or 
young, and how different. They manifest them- 
selves, their inner, their whole being to me, through 



122 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

radiant smiles and the beaming forth of love. An 
added, a second personality, let us say for want of 
a term, reaches, through the eye, my heart of 
hearts. They send forth the sweet melody of voice, 
the rich harmony of voices. They affect me with 
their ministries of care, helpful attentions, strength- 
ening nourishment, life. Each is one, but to me 
at least a trinity of blessing. 

Can I fail longer to get an intelligent glimpse of 
the one God, of the divine effluence, or manifesta- 
tion of the one God, in Christ ; the method of 
manifestation varying from that in my family with 
the nature of the subject? Can I fail to see how 
the influent energy and divine force of Deity may 
operate on my life, my heart — the Holy Ghost — 
drawing me as the sun draws and holds the planets 
in their paths, while it also infuses life like the 
sun. Thus understood, I have no prejudice against 
the terms. Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three per- 
sonalities, if we have no better term, yet One, the 
triune God, the Trinity. 

Can I longer doubt the possibility, the probabil- 
ity of the incarnation — God's method, now, in 
time, of manifesting me to my children. Himself to 
His creatures? Can I conceive that a God of love, 
related as father to a world of moral beings capa- 
ble of being influenced by Him, could refrain from 
thus manifesting Himself to them through the in- 
carnation, since that is the most convincing, if not 
the only really available method? Can I fail to 
understand more or less clearly how God our Fa- 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 123 

ther, being once manifested to our comprehension 
in a measure, may ever after this be with us, as 
the "Spirit of Truth", the Comforter, the inward 
light, the monitor which tries the reins and pro- 
nounces within us hourly the righteous judgments 
of God, not only, but creates us anew and so trans- 
forms us into the likeness of God that "sin has no 
longer dominion over us", so that there "can also 
be no more condemnation". Christ tells us who 
He is, in the gospel of John: "The Logos, the 
Word", the manifestation or expression of God's 
thought in the flesh, and thus the "Light and Life 
of the world". 

Paul says of him in Hebrews : "Who being the 
effulgence of His glory, and the impress (in the 
Greek, 'characteer', used also of the image of 
Caesar on Roman coin) of His substance", etc. In 
Romans, Paul calls Him the "prosopon of the Fa- 
ther", that of the Father which may be presented 
before the eyes of men. 

After these scriptural appreciative references to 
Him as representing in His life the godhead itself, 
how is it possible to conceive of the Father's re- 
quiring Him to suffer death to appease His wrath? 

This livid background of the Father's wrath may 
have seemed necessary to set off to savage, sensu- 
ous minds the tender sympathy of tlie Christly 
character. It might also to such minds magnify 
the sacerdotal office which undertook the task of 
mediation. Neither of these considerations is rele- 
vant to an enlightened age, and to such they are 



124 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

accounted unmoral and unreasonable. How differ- 
ent from this arithmetic of bargain and sale, this 
balancing of accounts with blood, is the arithmetic 
which God's daily dealings with men exemplify? 
"Mary", said a sprightly teacher, who knew when 
cherries were ripe, though for some reason they 
neglected to fall, "if you had forty pieces of gold, 
and Henry should steal twenty of them, how many 
would you have left?" "Twenty." Something in the 
tone of the shrewd teacher now encouraged Henry, 
whom pecuniary considerations had embarrassed, 
to add, "And, Mary, if you had forty measures of 
love, and I could steal all of them, how many 
measures would you have left"? "Eighty", was 
the prompt reply, for she knew the higher arith- 
metic of human love. After this success in a 
pleasing purpose, the teacher ventured to add : 
"And if you should devote all these to making 
others, even those who hate you, as happy as you 
are to be, what would you have left"? "An eter- 
nal weight of glory, of joy, of love". For she 
also knew the still higher arithmetic of divine love. 

And yet our theologian, as introduced above, 
would, for the sake of a theory built up out of a 
misconstruction of a tradition, exclude the Author 
and persistent distributor of all this bliss of love, 
from its beatitude, by representing His churlish- 
ness as so deep-seated that only the blood of His 
Son can assuage it. 

Yet men are "infidels" who question this horror. 
Is it strange that after centuries of it as the corner- 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 125 

stone of the popular faith, war has yearly increased 
in bloodiness, and that "Peace and good will" are so 
amazingly slow of realization, especially since the 
first century? "For at the first", according to a 
popular writer, "even Christians loved one an- 
other". 

I can not here review the whole system. It sets 
us a great way on, however, to see that the key to 
the common error regarding reconciliation with 
God into those new relations in which it is possible 
to grow into goodness, is found in the plain and 
unmasked perversion of a basic statement of God's 
word. Article II of the "Articles" reads: "One 
Christ, who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and 
buried, to reconcile His Father to us^ and to be a 
sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for 
actual sins of men". This is a presumed attempt, 
by one who had in his mind a paganized notion of 
atonement (at-one-ment) , to quote Paul's transcend- 
entally sublime assertion: "God was in Christ 
reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning their 
trespasses unto them." The difference, as it is 
seen, is as great as language can make it. Restor- 
ing the scripture reading inverts the whole thought 
and expresses what I find to be the rapidly growing 
view of the subject to-day. 

The definition of the word "sacrifice" is equally 
perverted, and this perverted definition having at- 
tached itself to the word as now used, in common 
life, renders it more a task for us to fall into the old 
thought expressed by it. But for the fact that this 



126 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

subversion has led to a depreciation of genuine 
character, except as a by-product, its discussion 
would be out of place here. As it is we can not af- 
ford to pass it. 

The word etymologically means to make sacred, 
to set apart for sacred use. One Hebrew word ren- 
dered sacrifice means to slaughter for food, another 
to cause to ascend. To make sacrifice is originally, 
then, to present, to send up to God as a pleasant 
gift, like pleasing food. Thus, Paul, in Phillipians, 
says of a welcome present, "an odor of a sweet 
smell, a sacrifice well pleasing to God". In He- 
brews, "By him let us offer the sacrifice of praise 
continually, the fruit of men's lips, giving thanks 
to his name ; but to do good and to communicate 
forget not, for with such sacrifice God is well 
pleased". There is no doubt that the Jews, like 
modern Christians, inverted this order of thought. 
To them as to us it came to mean something parted 
with reluctantly ; and thus, offering sacrifices came 
to be allied with giving up sins, then giving some- 
thing in addition further to satisfy and propitiate 
the favor of God to ease the conscience. But to 
correct this read many Psalms and many other Old 
Testament texts. So also in Ephesians, "Walk in 
love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given 
himself an offering, a sacrifice to God, for a sweet 
smelling savor". Christ himself says, "I lay down 
my life that I may take it again", as we have seen. 
"For this purpose the Son of God was manifest that 
He might destroy the works of the devil", not that 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 127 

He might appease the wrath of a "God, who so 
loved the world that he sent his son into the world 
to save it" . Again, "I sanctify myself that they also 
may be sanctified through the truth". Clearly the 
Christly, godly way of salvation. 

To sacrifice in the Old Testament was an act of 
worship. Death was not a necessary incident to 
offerings of this kind. Lev. ii, 4, "Cakes were to 
be presented and details were given" ; ii, 14, "Meat 
offerings of first fruits, green ears of corn dried by 
the fire, were offered" ; all described like the killing 
of animals in an animal sacrifice. In killing an 
animal for food, the death of the animal is in no 
case the end sought, yet, in the quite natural per- 
version of the thought in the minds of sensuous 
men, death, suffering, grew in significance till it be- 
came representative. Then sacrifice meant to kill ; 
finally, the animal died in man's place, and his 
blood secured God's favor. Then the costlier the 
sacrifice the more effective, and human sacrifice re- 
sulted from this downward tendency of thought. 

To make this more clear see that in one case one 
goat was made to bear the sins of the people con- 
fessed on its head. This goat was not offered in sac- 
rifice but sent into the wilderness of forgetfulness. 
The goat, without real or representative taint, was 
offered a "sweet savor", etc. That it might be a 
sweet savor no animal was offered in sacrifice which 
was in any sense imperfect, really or symbolically. 
All this was in accordance with the fashion of all 
early tribes who indulged freely in symbolic Ian- 



128 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

giiage, which, next to actual deeds and things, is 
the most impressive language. To the Indian a 
wayward daughter "is a thorn in the moccasin", a 
stubborn son "is a tree in the path on the way to 
the wigwam". So the reek of a heifer, whose 
breath is purity and sweetness ; of a lamb, the sym- 
bol of innocence ; a bullock representing healthful 
strength ; a dove, the symbol of affection ; the reek 
of these ascending from the altars conveyed the 
sentiments of the worshipers toward Heaven, as 
these worshipers were gathered about tlie hill or 
mountain summit. A day comes when again they 
are conscious of guilt. They take a lamb from the 
flock to reproduce the sense of forgiveness and puri- 
fication the other day so pleasing. In time this pro- 
cess deteriorated into a purchase of pardon and 
peace, an expiation. 

I can refer to only a few directive points in this 
question, culled, without pretense of originality, 
from luminous volumes written on it, which show 
that every passage in the Old and New Testaments 
is much more effective of the purpose of the 
speaker in the original sense of the word than in 
the new, engrafted sense of it. They also show 
clearly that these definitions comport far better 
with the aim of Christianity to promote a genuine 
spiritual and religious life and character. It is 
these luminous treatises and not, as we think, a 
greater tendency of the age to forget the importance 
of religion, which has loosened the practical thought 
of the age from much of the old theology, and has 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 129 

estranged men from it as a means of character- 
building. 

Tliis statement means little to the learned doctor 
who has just warned us against "appealing to rea- 
son in matters pertaining to religion", and to him 
who still more recently appealed to his hearers "to 
reverence the medieval thought because the medie- 
vals shamed the present age by their firmer faith 
in the doctrines handed down to them from the sa- 
cred desk". When a humanity emasculated of one 
of its most god-like attributes, reason, or when the 
credulity as characteristic of the savage as of the 
medieval, becomes an object of superior regard, 
such protests will serve to restrain this relatively 
thoughtful age from aspirations after genuine truth 
and goodness. 

The age of free schools for all classes, of free 
instruction in all simple arts and economies, that 
homes may be more comfortable and beautiful as 
well as intelligent and promotive of the best inter- 
ests of society ; the age of asylums, hospitals, and 
free clinics ; of sturdy battles for equal privileges 
for all men, women, and children ; the age of hu- 
mane societies, of effort to remove temptation by 
abolishing or limiting the evils of gregarious 
drunkenness ; the age of a more individual and in- 
tense study of scripture than any other, will not 
suffer in comparison with any age, in clear-sighted 
views of Christian purpose and work. 

As we know that character-building has not al- 
ways been the purpose of the sacerdotal methods, 



130 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

and that the scaling of the skies has been, it is not far 
to see how the system of expiation originated and 
has held its ground. It is not further to see that 
the man who, in accordance with the system, secures 
heaven by extreme unction or by a death-bed 
prayer, loses nothing in his own estimation, or the 
estimation of the w^orld, by a life spent in oppres- 
ing the poor, in debauchery, lust, laziness, aimless- 
ness of life, neglect of his family, or murder. The 
purpose of such a system may be attained with the 
lowest prevalent conditions of individual character 
and social life. The risk of losing heaven by a sud- 
den death is the only real element of force its advo- 
cates can wield. And how often are these easy, 
cadenced sentences resorted to in revivals and camp- 
meetings? The moral force of God's law of cause 
and effect is thus utterly destroyed in most lives 
and weakened in all. 

The numerous adamantine assertions of script- 
ure, "Whatsoever a man sowetli that shall he also 
reap", on which God sought to build a kingdom of 
effective righteousness on earth, is replaced by the 
wall of coble-stones without mortar, "Whatsoever 
a man prayeth for on his death-bed, that shall he 
reap", since the meritorious suffering of Christ sat- 
isfied the demands of the law as to all questions of 
character and fitness. 

Thus the lover of good and of men, the ever so 
zealous character-builder, however he may mourn 
that only apples of Sodom can grow on such a tree, 
must shut his eyes to all this evil, or be branded, 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 131 

bj the easy-going public sentiment it has engendered, 
as an "infidel". 

It is this system, constructed by craft for an easy- 
going world, which has given us a pagan Thibet 
and a Christian (?) Spain. The modifications of 
these conditions in other Christian countries are 
due to other social and moral influences, which a 
good God planned from the beginning, and is ever 
planning, to overcome evil with good. Human ex- 
perience, education, culture, man's inborn sense of 
equity and right, the constant, living, lifting, and 
healing influence of real truth, and of God's ever- 
urgent spirit, have measurably saved the freer Chris- 
tian countries from the extreme results of the sys- 
tem in Spain and Italy. 

If I could be allowed a word, sub rosa, so as not 
to offend household gods which have been the oc- 
casion of many tender associations, I should sug- 
gest that the hymn-book is the source of much of 
the sweetest fruit of life, and of many apples of 
Sodom. Luther's "Ein starkes Burg ist unser 
Gott" (A strong tower is our God) redeems his life, 
even though his instruction to the judges caused, 
through ignorance and credulity, the murder of 
many a "witch." Many of the soporifics of the 
hymn-book are also redeemed from their lethargic 
tendencies by some touch of humane sentiment. 
The tune and the pathos have kept others to the 
front, whose only quality is narcotic. 

It does our burley, big-hearted Scotch sergeant, 
foreman in the foundry, the idol of the sick and 



132 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

sorrowing, no harm perhaps, to sing the only thing 
he can sing: ^'Of all me father's family I loov 
meself the best. Me ooncle Sam take care o' me, 
the divil take the rest". But it is not the song 
which keeps alive his sympathies, nor would the 
words tend to soften the hearts of really selfish men. 
So, many who from habit, association, or an itching 
for mere pathos, sing Toplady's cradle song of 
sovereign grace, may be stalwarts among the work- 
ers in God's kingdom. But the influence of its one 
sentiment is to keep them in the garden of ease. 
It was originally aimed against the worker Wesley, 
and became popular, as all sedatives do, for its very 
sedative effect. It looks to God himself, in the 
person of Christ, to ''fulfill for us all the law's de- 
mands", a term having no place in the Christian 
system. 

For the scripture "work out your own salvation, 
for God is working in you that you may work his 
will", it washes, clothes, silences remorse, banishes 
fear, all through sovereign grace, of which we be- 
come the passive recipients, by crying, "Lord, 
Lord". According to our author of "The Atone- 
ment, in five parts", quoted above, "It does not 
even ask forbearance on the part of God, and re- 
pentance and change of conduct on the part of the 
sinner". (Sic.) 

In this line of thought, also, one is tempted to 
observe, and with a higher purpose tlian criticism, 
how the holy, tumultuous rapture of Wesley's poetry 
promotes pride in his leadership, a pride well 



THE PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 133 

placed, if always resting on the truth of the case. 
But, failing to notice that this rapture celebrates 
the triumphs of Wesley's notably active and fertile 
co-operation with God in reforming men and society, 
mere sectarian partisans are led to tug at their own 
boot-straps to reproduce the picturesque transports 
of "Old-fashioned Methodism", in which their 
pride seems easily to exhaust itself. 

It is these lapses from those high ideals, purposes 
and efforts which gave the great leaders their 
power and efficiency, that has lost to the church, 
and especially to the great body of the clergy, that 
consideration accorded to these leaders of reform. 
When the Grecian people forgot personal heroism 
in idolatry of heroic ancestors, they ceased to be 
Grecians except in name. There is no true follower 
of Wesley, who is not to-day turning the world up- 
side down with earnest sympathy and intelligent 
devotion to win men to good and God. No one 
would object to Wesley as a leader to-day, since he 
would now, as a hundred years ago, be a progres- 
sive thinker and worker for humanity. Calvin 
will be remembered in heaven for the saving reforms 
he effected by his godly work in Geneva, and which 
inspired John Knox to his great work in Scotland. 
Out of the current of weird, popular superstitions 
of his day, it is not wonderful that his ardent nature 
should conjure theories that should glitter for a time 
in comparison with the darker waters below. Nor 
is it a wonder that in Scotland, where these theories 
held most active sway, and where enlightened rea- 



134 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

son is achieving its most radical triumphs, these 
theories should now be most eflPectually ignored.* 

The lesson these great leaders have left us is not 
in their isms but in their work and its results. 
These go to support Christ's assertions of the su- 
preme ability of his truth and spirit to redeem the 
world to Himself and to good. With their spirit 
truly moving the professedly religious world in this 
day of active thought and reason, who doubts its 
power with the help of God's truth and spirit to 
realize the Christly promise of righteousness and 
peace and good, through whose fruits alone, ''The 
Father is, or can be glorified on earth"? 

I have dared, my fellow citizens, to discuss a 
few points in your widely accepted system called 
orthodoxy, because I have been urged to do so. It 
has been suggested that you would be interested to 
hear from one whose convictions have of necessity 
been formed through direct study of the sources of 
knowledge and through personal thought born of 
an absorbing sense of the supreme and eternal im- 
portance of the subject to all conditions of the hu- 
man race. During my fifty years' residence in 
America, my interest in tracing the efi'ect of differ- 
ent systems of thought on the character of your 
people has not flagged. The result to-day is an 
overflowing gratitude for the increasing evidence of 
a more intense and absorbing interest in the at- 
tainment of important ends through the simplest 
and least cumbersome systems of thought. This 
progress accords with the progress in physical 



PAPER OF DR. PRINCE. 135 

sciences. God, the source of creative force and of 
all forces, is Love. The moving spring, as also the 
shaping energy of God's methods with man is love ; 
not a yielding, sentimental love, but infinite, eter- 
nal love, which sees the end from the beginning, 
and adapts appropriate means to its high purposes 
of good — but still love, with no parallax or shad- 
ow of temporal or earthly passion or bias. 

My hope for a people who have been kind to me, 
and whom I love, was well expressed the other day 
by "a leading lawyer of the West", and quoted ap- 
provingly by Bishop Potter: "Out of the present 
condition of social unrest, which I see every- where 
around me, men will find their way to a truer view 
of the religion of Christ". Indeed, in England, 
where, during a recent sojourn of two years for 
special study, I became much interested in the ad- 
vancing thought, as also in Scotland, I am glad 
to see that eight denominations have united in a 
New Catechism. This is a hopeful step and har- 
bingers the millennium. 

ROCK OF AGES. 

[Adapted to the New Thought.] 

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee. 
In Thy likeness born again, 
Lead me, O Thou Light of men. 
While life's cares and strifes I know, ■ 
Living Word, Thy power bestow. 

God in Christ my heart to move, 
Shows His deathless Father-love ; 



136 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Gives Himself and Heaven to me, 
When, in ]ove, He giveth Thee ; 
Let that Father-love and Thine 
Toward a brother kindle mine. 

In my hands what price can be 
For Thy changeless love to me ? 
What for that eternal good, 
Power to be a child of God ? 
Childhood's trust, O let me know, 
Childhood's joy to work, to grow. 

Christ within, a living hope, 
Can I fear, or, halting, grope ? 
Health and strength in Thee I find, 
Sin and death to leave behind. 
Grant me, then, this only plea, 
Heart to walk and work with Thee. 



THE professor's PAPER. 137 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE professor's PAPER. 



Giving the club's educational, economic and moral work, includ- 
ing a system of education embracing all the life and its inter- 
ests, assisted by special teachers and lecturers, employed by 
the county board of education to lecture, and conduct these 
studies, including, also, say sixteen well educated, well sup- 
ported moral teachers, in a county of sixteen townships, with 
such ''authority" as their good sense and spiritual master- 
fulness give them, in place of sixty-six sectarian " authori- 
ties", half educated and half starved, to propagate apathy and 
"infidelity". 

After the residents of the county, all of whom 
were identified with the interests of the club, had 
become reasonably successful in their economic 
enterprises, and had reached, through the club 
associations and discussions, a revaluation of indi- 
vidual humanity and of social forces, as compared 
with all other human concerns, they turned their 
attention more seriously to educational facilities 
for their children. 

They proposed here, as in other matters, not to 
take it for granted that because a custom was a 
hundred, or even a thousand years old, it was the 
truest and best possible, or because those assuming 
its direction exhausted superlatives in its praise, 
was it, therefore, a ne plus ultra? 



138 • CHARACTER NOT CREEDS 

For elementary intellectual culture, the "graded 
scliool system" has, for example, assumed to bear 
in its very name all the practical perfections. It 
is accordingly assumed that the more the individual 
pupil has of this system the better he must be edu- 
cated. As several of the most intelligent and prac- 
tical members of the club hailed from New England, 
or the West, where these perfections were generally 
understood to be at the zenith, their experiences 
and reflections were listened to with interest. They 
had found in the system the best possible means of 
studying individual character and of subserving 
the individual interests of pupils. But they also 
found the temptation so strong to make the system 
procrustean, exhaustively finical and showy, that it 
became a question whether even so perfect a sys- 
tem in theory has really so much advanced the true 
interests of education. New England experience 
had taught that boys who had attended a good New 
England rural school, four or five months in each 
year, and had been employed, not as drudges, but 
as intelligent coadjutors in farming activities, dur- 
ing the rest of the year, and had then come into a 
school of higher grade in a city, were quite sure to 
be the most practical and purposeful boys, and, in 
the most useful studies, the best scholars. Putting 
these observations along side of Dugald Stewart's 
doctrine, which was made a corner-stone in the 
Scottish system of education; that "the exercise of 
the imagination is more productive of mental 
growth than the exercise of any other mental 



THE professor's PAPER. 139 

faculty", this experience led to mucli fertile discus- 
sion. Of course, Brand's definition of "The Imagi- 
nation" is to be taken ; the "contriving, inventive, 
creative faculty", the power to adapt means to 
ends, to take two things answering their respective 
uses, holding them to the mind's eye and con- 
structing of them a third thing answering a dif- 
ferent use. This removes the system the farthest 
from the aerial categories of the mere pedagogical 
theorist. 

Without stopping to consider the reasons for this 
fact, it is a fact that men were and are planted 
quite near the ground. Their best growth is se- 
cured, and their best achievements are recorded, 
when they are grappling with the solid facts about 
them. 

The fact that the Scotch people could become the 
richest people per capita on the globe, out of about 
the stubbornest soil on the globe, and at the same 
time furnish the strongest, most entertaining, influ- 
ential thinkers, must grow largely out of their 
quick sympathy with all that is human, the human- 
izing influence of human interests, in short. 

Paul, the tent-maker, could not fail to observe 
and tell us that, in the true order of development, 
there must be "The first man, of the earth, earthy, 
before there could be the second man, of heaven, 
heavenly". (See Grotius' correction of the evi- 
dently interpolated reading here.) We are to ^^Rise 
into newness of life", from Earth, even from the 
grave, before "we see Him as He is, and become 



140 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

truly like Him". So as we go, the sense of the 
beautiful ; the pure reason, the sense of truth ; the 
conscience, or sense of the superlative excellence of 
good ; the sense of infinity ; the sense of God ; all 
the spirit senses, are developed and show themselves 
as human qualities in virtue of healthy and orderly 
unfolding as human qualities. They are sustained 
and natural in their activities, they are powerful to 
influence and lift humanity, in proportion to their 
conscious relationship to human interests. Wisdom 
yields her treasures not only, but healthful, aspir- 
ing youth and manhood respond to the man of 
achievement, to masterfulness, in some line of prac- 
tical life. Everet, at Gettysburg, was ready to 
barter the voluminous and labored fabric of days 
and weeks of refined effort, for the one, single, 
sweeping, comprehensive period of the Mississippi 
boatman's earthgrown sympathy and insight. 

The digestion of these facts led, among other 
things, to a consideration of the proper time in life 
for developing the powers of observation and of 
adaptation of means to ends. The observation of 
intelligent mothers as to the growth of the child 
mind and the method of this growth, largely by 
contact. with things and facts and by tentative, 
properly directed experiences, became of value. In 
this connection the assertion of a rather eccentric 
young "graduate", that a boy from three to four 
years of age is half as tall as he will ever be, and 
that, by this daily, interested, prying contact with 
his new world, he then knows half as much as he 



THE professor's PAPER. 141 

will ever know, astonished the club as much by the 
narrowness of his escape from proving his propo- 
sition as by his announcement of it. It became 
evident that the nascent condition of childhood is 
as necessary to the awakening or keeping alive of 
its practical and efficient activities as it is to the 
acquisition of mere knowledge. The one interest 
stimulates the other. The two are much more cer- 
tainly and in shorter time developed together than 
consecutively. Hence the value of keeping the 
child much at nature's free school outside of the 
school house. 

Instruction in the use of the hand and eye, even if 
crude, has many elements of vantage. The activi- 
ties of the country boy are intimately and familiarly 
in the paths of his daily, personal life. Hence they 
are accompanied by a more constant and pleasur- 
able interest. With less consciousness of hourly 
accretions, perhaps, the aggregation is even more 
rapid and available. In so far as he may add a 
mastery of animals to his score his manliness has 
become more complete. The precarious moods of a 
yacht help in the same way. But to these ends the 
best of opportunities for obtaining a knowledge of 
governing principles and of related facts are essen- 
tial to the country lad. Without them he becomes 
a mere mechanical drudge or a roysterer. 

The field for the application of practical knowl- 
edge and thus for the acquisition of manly, self- 
reliant, masterful qualities are unlimited in the 
country. Reading and the exercise of unbiased 



142 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

reason, with what opportunities the neighborhood 
affords for interchange of opinions, furnishes the 
means of acquiring a large and self-sustained indi- 
viduality scarcely surpassed even in professional 
positions. 

Accordingly, the importance of superior educa- 
tional privileges in our country life was consid- 
ered by our people as imperative. This intelligent 
conviction, though a gigantic stride, was, however, 
but the first step. Only a small fraction of the hu- 
man family seem able to efficiently gather the 
interests of ten or a dozen years, much less of a 
lifetime, into the decisions of to-day. A less num- 
ber can start upon and hold to a course involving 
constant expense, real thought, masterful care, and 
independent action under strong temptation to 
easy-going courses. Yet all this is implied in the 
efficient support of an educational system. 

These conclusions reached, the next step looked 
to the inducement of really competent persons to 
devote themselves to the work of teaching. A four 
or six months' country school offers no such induce- 
ment. Whatever inconvenience may be implied in 
the assertion, some other plan than that which this 
practice implies must be found. How can the 
requisite permanence at a supporting salary be se- 
cured? The question could not be answered by a 
neighborhood committee having no authority out- 
side the limits of a country district. The experi- 
ment was, therefore, forced upon them to have 



THE professor's PAPER. 143 

the county organized as a single school district, by 
special enactment. 

Under the conviction that five months was a 
large enough proportion of the year to confine a 
child to the school-room, they adopted a policy 
vrhich secured the erection of a suitable house in 
each of such localities as would fairly accommodate 
the children and youth. In some cases provision 
was made to convey children from distant homes' 
to the proper school, even across the subdistrict 
lines, if necessary. In other cases a suitable house 
was provided where farmers might board their older 
children at charges 'pro rata, or on the co-operative 
system. 

Thus teachers possessing qualities above that of 
those who are satisfied to know and teach the three 
R's, were employed for the whole year of ten months, 
the pupils to attend in relays the grades as directed, 
five months in each year. A special teacher was 
employed in each of several specialties, going from 
school to school as occasion required. The employ- 
ment by the whole county of such specialists fur- 
nished facilities for diffusing their valuable knowl- 
edge among the busy adult people of both sexes. 
Thus the study of agricultural and domestic chem- 
istry, of botany, of entomology, of practical phi- 
losophy and hygiene, of comparative anatomy and 
the elements of veterinary science, became possible. 

The increase of intelligence in the handling of 
domestic animals and of their comfort, perfection, 
and efficiency, became early apparent. The bugs 



144 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

and worms of the gardens and orchards yielded to 
intelligent treatment, and the greater variety and 
perfection of garden vegetables, of fruits, and of 
flowers, conduced greatly to the health, pleasure, 
comfort, and refinement of the people. 

The English people have charged that the Amer- 
icans, while they own more horses, for example, 
than other nations, know less of the anatomy of 
the horse, and take, generally, less intelligent care 
of him. In this we have noticed great improve- 
ments. Our horses, under a higher intelligence 
and quicker conscience, are better groomed, and 
are fed and driven more intelligently. The hoof, one 
of the most cunningly devised of all God's handi- 
works, with the purpose of making it possible for 
the animal to throw, with great velocity, the weight 
of a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds upon a 
hard road each half second, for years, has been 
studied, greatly to the increased comfort and effi- 
ciency of the animal. Instead of its spongy, elas- 
tic character being destroyed by cramping shoes, 
the shoes are put on so as to leave opportunity for 
the hoof to spread with the blow, and thus to re- 
lieve all jar. In a thousadn ways we are observing 
ameliorations of suffering under this higher intelli- 
gence and quicker sense of responsibility. Labor- 
ing people are no longer expected to be humane, 
refined, virtuous, religious, who are heathenishly 
crowded together in one-roomed cabins, regardless 
of sex, age or condition, as if only employers had 
human nature or souls. 



THE PROFESSOR ^S PAPER. 146 

Under the new departure from the old conviction 
that the three R's constituted an education, young 
people are learning something of their own tem- 
ples for the indwelling of immortal spirits, and for 
the visitation and companionship of heavenly vis- 
itors. By the proper individual and municipal 
water supply and other material improvements, 
and a higher conception of our privileged relations, 
through temperance and purity of life, with the 
health-inspiring influences of the heavenly springs 
of life, a sweeter and more wholesome look char- 
acterizes the youthful groups. 

This new interest has also led men and women, 
whose occupation gives them opportunities for spe- 
cial knowledge and experiences, to respond to the 
higher sense of social privilege and responsibility 
attained, by contributing of this knowledge and ex- 
perience to the general good. Instead of waiting 
for systems of University extension to lift the whole 
of society, a liberally educated young lawyer, for 
example, yearly gives our club a most interesting 
course of lectures on parliamentary law. These 
lectures are listened to with eagerness by a large 
number of young men and women who had begun 
to feel the swelling buds of ambition or to forecast 
the increase of interest in social co-operative effort 
for building up highways to a higher intelligence 
and spiritual life, such as social clubs for promot- 
ing character building and for other social inter- 
ests. Our county papers are obliged to meet the 
higher demands of the new life. 



146 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

So the preachers, who are now beginning to drop 
their claim to being "called" to defend sectarian 
dogmas and to exclusive "divine rights" to minis- 
ter in godly things, and are beginning to be ap- 
preciated as teachers and promoters of ethical cul- 
ture, also lend a hand in this work. Devoting 
themselves to keeping alive a sense of our relations 
to each other, and to God as the keystone of all 
high character, and of all institutions and systems for 
building character — humanity — the inspiring and 
assuring source of all claim to human brotherhood, 
they find a much more exalted place in the affec- 
tionate appreciation of their neighbors than when 
engaged about narrower matters. As active coad- 
jutors in building a more effective system of prac- 
tical education, and social interests generally, their 
high relation to the general social life is better ap- 
preciated. Our human nature will never get be- 
yond the need of high, spiritual ministration. The 
Frederick Eobertsons, the Phillips Brookses, the 
Ian MacLarens, the Savonarolas, the Elijahs, the 
Florence Nightingales, the Elizabeth Frys, the Miss 
Willards, the Lady Somersets, will always be mes- 
sengers of a higher progress in thought, and in 
effort to establish God's kingdom on earth. As 
every great enterprise requires its professional ex- 
perts specially adapted to the developing of pro- 
gressive lines of action, to facilitating processes, 
and to enlarging the application of the products of 
their schemes, so with the moral machinery of so- 
ciety. 



THE professor's PAPER. 147 

Physicians also find it conducive to their happi- 
ness as conscious factors in a more complete social 
scheme, to prepare and deliver lectures on some of 
the broad interests their profession represents. 

The intelligent employment of mind and muscle 
in the varied occupations this interest occasioned, 
has added almost as much to the moral forces of 
the county as the recent expansion of industrial 
interests by the introduction of manufacturing en- 
terprises has done to material interests. 

Young people who for lack of sympathy with the 
single business of farming, or who had been 
crowded out of the monotonous and infertile busi- 
ness of measuring calico, had become drones, with 
the proverbial dangers of that condition, now find 
life so full of inviting enterprises that no time nor 
inclination is left for droning or unfruitful occupa- 
tions. Not that these changes constituted the sum 
of moral forces, but as a ship can then only be 
steered to its haven when it is under propulsion, 
so a stagnant individual or communfty has little 
promise of reaching high moral or intellectual con- 
ditions. 

It is not my intention to weary you with details 
of the improved methods which the more active 
popular interest in real character building has been 
instrumental in developing in our community. It 
satisfies my purpose if, auxiliar to our general in- 
terest, I have shown that in this social mine, which 
has been so long worked over, there are still veins 
undeveloped which are destined to yield large re- 



148 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. ' 

turns. I am convinced that under the nourishing 
influences of a sufficiently urgent popular interest 
many improvements in the methods of youth cul- 
ture are yet to be developed. All that is desirable 
can not be secured by pedagogical theorists. Indeed 
the extravagances of any class of people who are 
left to spin theories ad libitum in their closets, are 
often the very things to be corrected. If the theo- 
rist is a Greek scholar, nothing which does not pass 
through his wicket can be education. He can not 
see that the God who calls eighty per cent of the 
human family to the farm, has not failed to attach 
to this business all the conditions necessary to the 
highest culture. If a physicist, he sees no use to 
be subserved by linguistic culture. 

Broader methods of thought than those which 
characterize men who are not called on to battle 
with life's actual, broad and thorn-armed interests, 
are also necessary. Without the least intention to 
be invidious, we are obliged to notice that peda- 
gogues, clergymen, book-keepers, men accustomed 
to live alone on salaries, and who are not called on 
to invent, contrive, create resources, are not neces- 
sarily the best leaders even in their own specialties. 
The experiences and reflections of men with judicial, 
commercial and constructive habits of life, must 
furnish the framework of any effective social 
scheme which embraces all these detailed interests, 
together with that broader interest common to all. 

Manual training schools, for example, now doing 
good work for the youth and the country, were es- 



THE professor's PAPER. 149 

tablished without pedagogical suggestions and 
largely against pedagogical protest. No one is to 
blame for this. It was inevitable in the nature of 
things. Men who in their experience saw the ne- 
cessity of preparing their children to meet the con- 
ditions forced upon them by the peculiar methods 
introduced by the narrow and exclusive interests of 
the artisan classes, furnished in large part the mov- 
ing force to this progress, now become much broader 
than even their thought. These facts tend to show 
the truth of our contention, however, that only 
under the nourishing influence of an active and 
urgent popular intelligence is any improved method 
of youth culture likely to spring into being, or, if 
it does so, to leave its swaddling clothes. 

Thus the first and essential requisite of an effi- 
cient system for real education, character-building, 
in any community, is this nourishing influence of 
an all pervading urgency for such a system and its 
solid fruits. This supreme valuation of this interest, 
as compared with all other interests secured in 
these days, all other requisites can be added. From 
the suggestions of university extension courses, of 
resident and non-resident universities and the like, 
there is no lack of intelligent suggestion along these 
lines. Our one purpose is to contribute a force ever 
so trifling toward rallying the denizens of field, 
hamlet and village, into conditions for availing 
themselves of the means already developed on the 
higher but numerically narrower planes. 

To clear the way for the thorough and exhaustive 



150 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

organization of all the industrial, patriotic and 
other moral forces to effect this great work of char- 
acter-building in America, the widest range of 
discussion has been indulged in. No effort has been 
made to leave the plane of the hearth and the plow- 
beam, which represents by far the broadest human 
interest numerically, and at the same time the most 
available material for successful manipulation. It 
is of course the purpose of the club to leave uni- 
versity education to universities. 

Of the fertile promise of the increasingly popular 
club, life, which for its best purposes maybe said to 
have begun with the Y. M. C. A., and to be finding 
so far its best broadly popular exemplifications in 
the high purposed woman's club, I feel called on 
to say but little. A leading and highly appreciated 
characteristic of our own club seems to be tangible 
recognition of our essential mutual interest in the 
great movements of life, in its greatest and most 
sacred concerns, as well economical as intellectual 
and moral ; an interest too great to be left entirely 
to hireling agencies or to chance. The form of this 
organization, a combination of sections having 
special interests to consider, all related to and cen- 
tering in the common interest, enables us to foster 
interests, classes of interests, and interests pertain- 
ing to classes of persons, heretofore wholly neglected 
or very inadequately attended to by any organized 
forces. It gives to all these interests and classes of 
persons a chance to be represented and to avail 
themselves of the advantages of all the progressive 



THE professor's PAPER. 151 

movements of "thought ; through reading matter, 
lectures, experiments, discussions. The result has 
been to quicken a sense of social privilege and of 
individual responsibility, all of which has multi- 
plied effort and the fruits of effort. 

The fact that the county has, at public expense, 
erected a spacious, attractive auditorium, divisible 
into convenient section rooms, is a weighty recog- 
nition of the importance of the purposes of the 
club. As the public court-house recognizes the im- 
portance of a tribunal for adjusting unbalanced or 
doubtful rights in all the departments and on all 
the planes of life, so the auditorium is a recognition 
of the importance of such social activity on the 
material, intellectual and moral planes of life as 
shall result in a proper understanding and recogni- 
tion of these interests and these rights, and in the 
personal realization of them without resort to 
querulous issues regarding them. Thus peace and 
good will are promoted. 

This preventive action has been found, so far, 
to be much cheaper than the common curative and 
restraining measures ; and incomparably more ef- 
ficient than the efforts of the sectaries, conducted 
with little apparent purpose, except to keep full the 
rolls of the organizations. 

Following the rule that all things are likely to 
have a reasonable limit, our aims have considered 
only the rural counties and their larger or smaller 
centers of population, which have thought clubs 
and their blessings in the way of science and other 



152 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

lectures and instruction courses must' always be con- 
fined to cities. In these there is not an interest, 
from the professions and manufacturing interests to 
that of the hod carrier, which has not been quickened 
and elevated, in its economical as well as its intel- 
lectual, social and moral aspects. Men have learned, 
to the surprise of many, that in lifting the common 
planes of life they have most effectually lifted them- 
selves and their families. Every quickened in- 
fluence, on any of the planes of life, has become 
a quickening force and fertile of new general re- 
sources. 

As the railroad and the steamer are only possible 
to Croesus and the king by embracing interests as 
broad as the world, so our club and its auditorium 
has, by its all-embracing- popular character, fur- 
nished resources for culture and comfort which the 
best conditioned individuals could not secure among 
the disintegrating and distracting competitions, 
rivalries, and jealousies of sacerdotal-sectarian rule. 

The auditorium, with its audiences of one to six 
thousand, for example, is able to call to the service 
of religion and social improvement, the largest and 
broadest minds of the land. Its larger field, its 
broader, less sinister purpose, its better promise of 
results, its ability to furnish to talent, learning and 
religious aspiration, comfortable conditions and a 
higher appreciation of service generally, afford far 
higher inducements to the best talent, than the multi- 
plied sects can do toward that highest art-field of 
the universe — character-building. 



THE professor's PAPER. 153 

The auditorium for the gatherings of the people 
of all the county has, of course, given new and 
efficient impulse to road-making. It has not, how- 
ever, diminished the eagerness of the more distant 
neighborhoods to build or utilize convenient edifices 
for grange meetings or religious gatherings. The 
larger life and higher aspirations inspired by the 
Spurgeons, the Phillipps Brookses and Ian McLar- 
ens, who have found a home for their work in our 
auditorium, is not likely to show itself in meaner 
privileges in the home and neighborhood. 

We hsive found less difficulty in awakening gen- 
eral interest in humane matters than we anticipated. 
That many "outsiders" are more ready to take up 
the great interests of humanity than are many sec- 
taries, or than sectaries suppose, witness that in 
1850 the small city of N., in Ohio, had a rival sec- 
tarian academy at each end of its one long street. 
These were offering education to such as could pay 
a round tuition and dress well. Many women were 
shortening their lives over midnight oil to earn the 
tuition and dress that should free their daughters, 
especially, from "the disgrace of attending the 
public school", an utterly neglected ragged school, 
in fact. 

Tired, ashamed, alarmed by these conditions, en- 
terprising men and women, not of the church in- 
terest, and against the active opposition of many 
of that interest, joined to improve the people's 
schools. The best people gave themselves to this 
work, as Christ gave Himself to His Father's work. 



154 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

A club of noble women met each week to cut and 
baste garments to be taken home to make for any 
children who were not comfortably and cleanly clad. 
Twice a month some one of the best residences in the 
city, containing a musical instrument, was opened 
to afford an opportunity for any, the poorest and 
the richest children, to engage in cultivating exer- 
cises on equal terms. The school was soon doing 
so much better than the schools first referred to, 
that the children belonging to the families inter- 
ested in those schools began to drop into these. In 
three years the two academies sold out to the public 
school interest, which has been doing superior 
work for the community and humanity — that is, 
for God, ever since. I remember how, after three 
years, a well-to-do merchant crossed the street to 
express to me his satisfaction that *'the hitherto 
unprivileged daughter of his washerwoman had, 
on the rostrum yesterday, surpassed his own daugh- 
ter, who had enjoyed all the advantages attainable 
in first-class institutions." This child of the peo- 
ple became an efficient teacher and helped, by her 
sympathies and work, many of her own position to 
higher planes of life. It happened — by mere acci- 
dent, of course — that no clergyman joined in this 
work until its success was well assured. And the 
above was the concurrent history of scores of Ohio 
cities. 

It is also true to-day, that city churches whose 
chief characteristic is loving work, leaving dogma 
purposely behind, are growing rapidly and con- 



THE professor's PAPER. 155 

stantly. Of course this remark applies to cities of 
some size, and it does not contradict our contention 
recrardins the evils of finical divisions in the town- 
ships and villages, where still a majority of our 
population, and its most promising classes, remain. 
It emphasizes that contention. Furthermore, in a 
state where my acquaintance is wide and intimate, 
I know that *'I speak the truth and lie not", in 
saying that there are thousands of teachers whose 
earnest, honest purpose to glorify God by helping, 
lifting, glorifying humanity, will compare more 
than favorably with these qualities in as many 
thousands of clergymen, not obliged nor accus- 
tomed to submit the results of their work to any 
measurement. Yet thousands of these teachers 
have never "made a profession", "subscribed to a 
creed". 

It is, at the same time, true that thousands of 
the clergy would rejoice in greater freedom, but 
they fear that neither their congregations nor their 
professional brethren would sympathize with them. 
And let the physician or the lawyer who would 
censure the clergyman who hesitates to break his 
lock-step with these great historic organizations, 
try it by action which challenges the interests sanc- 
tified by the customs of his profession. 

The great need of the day is a number of giant 
leaders, like Spurgeon in his later, freer, better 
days ; Charles Terry Collins, Beecher, Swing, able 
to make their way in organizing those who are will- 
ing to devote themselves, as to the higher side of 



156 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

life, to glorifying God by co-operating with Him in 
the uplifting and glorification of men ; just as men 
and women are organized for the special work of 
youth culture and for other forms of good, without 
being burdened with or tempted to the defense of 
medieval whims. It is not to be expected that the 
common clergy will initiate such a movement, with 
the bones of recusant reformers whitening the pro- 
fessional paths. There is, however, a larger amount 
of willing and effective material, on the higher 
planes, intellectual and humane, that is, on the 
truly religious planes, in and out of these glacial 
intruders into the busy bays of this earnestly active 
age, than is generally known of. Our organization 
has found no difficulty in enlisting the sympathies 
of nearly the whole community, since a promising 
start was made, and it is thus demonstrating new 
practical possibilities. The women's clubs, the 
Christian Endeavor, the Salvation Army, the Y. M. 
C. A., are tentative, though sometimes merely 
strategetical, compromising, and apologetic, ap- 
proaches to this deeper set and broader work for 
which we contend. 

As I am not without modesty and sympathy, and 
perhaps should not be without a wholesome fear of 
"authority", I desire to whisper the following bit of 
history into the private ear of this great assembly of 
representative teachers, my brethren. During the 
last sixty years, which may aptly be called the 
teacher's era, beginning with Horace Mann and 
Henry Barnard, in the East ; Samuel Lewis, H. H. 



THE professor's PAPER. 157 

Barney, Lorin and I. W. Andrews, and Leggett, in 
the middle West ; Edwards and Picard in the then 
far West ; with the great hosts who were touched 
with their leaven, or, like them, with the direct 
baptism of the spirit of humanity, that is, of God ; 
including more recently the teachers in all the 
greater universities, whatever their origin, since 
many of them are now doing stalwart service in 
picking the mortar from sacerdotal walls of divi- 
sion ; these great, organized hosts, having thirty 
hours of weekly intimate, sympathizing contact 
with the entire body of nascent childhood and 
youth, have, during these sixty years, occasioned 
more substantial progress toward the millennium 
than was made during the whole of the long centu- 
ries since primitive Christianity was displaced from 
earth by sacerdotalism, which so long controlled all 
educational interests. 

Gentlemen of the board of straggling and expen- 
sive inefficiency (see ecclesiastical testimony, supra, 
pages 17-22) and ye gentlemen of the board of 
proudly complacent infidelity regarding the power 
of the "Living Word", as set forth in Christ's 
simple life through the gospels, to bring men into 
and train them for a kingdom of heaven on earth 
(see Phillips Brooks' sermons), we of the hearth 
and plow-beam, in and out of the church, are ready 
for something better than your weary, promising 
centuries have given us, through the distracting de- 
vices of * 'primitive Baptists" and other primitive 
dogmatists. 



158 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

We henceforth, and for the purposes of gen- 
nine character-building, desire God, as the God 
of the Bible and of reason represents Himself. 
This God we understand. We hear His voice. 
"He leads us out of the land of Egypt, out of the 
house of bondage". He calls us : "I am the Lord, 
thy Good, who forgive th all thine iniquities, who 
healeth all thine infirmities" ; "Blessed are they 
who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they 
shall be filled". 

Spurgeon, Brooks, Beecher, Finney, Charles 
Terry Collins, Swing, sanctioned our choice of this 
rediscovered God. Here and there, in Scotland, in 
the large cities of England, and especially of 
America, great leaders are turning away from your 
dogmas, as matters of no relevancy in their work 
of saving the world from present ruin, and not no- 
ticing your designation of them as "evangelical ( ?) " . 
They are taking to this God, and are trying to 
build God's kingdom here, on earth. So do thou- 
sands upon thousands of the people hunger for a 
fertile, efficient gospel, that where such a gospel 
begins to be preached the churches grow amaz- 
ingly. 

For the villages and townships of America, 
shrouded in multiplied sects, which divert in rival, 
jealous distractions from a proper provision for one 
effective institution, with a purpose which com- 
mends itself to the common sense of religious peo- 
ple, in place of a starving five or more institutions, 
with just life enough to pose, and to divert means 



THE professor's PAPER. 159 

needed to support teachers qualified to build in. the 
youth of the place efficient, patriotic and religious 
character, and from other beneficences ; of all this 
crime against the country, humanity, and the God 
who seeks His own glory through the perfections of 
moral- beings, Lord, how long? 

Meanwhile the teachers and the young men and 
women of what the highest European authority has 
pronounced the foremost nation on earth, and of an 
age when the inspirations of this great people may, 
in the very hour of their birth, become the aspira- 
tions of the remotest tribes of the globe, have an 
unspeakable wealth of promise and load of respon- 
sibility. 

There is a sun of the moral universe, a Sun of 
Righteousness. The spots which have obscured the 
light of this sun are in reality no more, in their re- 
lation to its great resources, than are those which 
figure almost unnoticed on the physical sun. But 
as a shilling near the eye may wholly shut out the 
moon, so while the world has suffered itself to be 
busied with forms of faith and faith in forms, the 
great resources of the moral universe have been 
largely lost sight of. We have perhaps a right to 
feel impatient with this fact and with the fact that 
the race has been measurably shut out from its 
great inheritance of heaven on earth, by the in- 
terest into which it has suffered itself to be drawn 
by the promise of individual admission into a dis- 
tant heaven, by so easy a figment as imputed char- 
acter, evidenced by a "confession of faith" in the 



160 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

saving efficacy of imputed character, and founded 
on the fiction that man's chief end is to reach 
Heaven, instead of that nobility of soul which 
glorifies both God and man. We may be more im- 
patient still that this figment has so soaped the 
wheels of the gospel chariot that they have slipped 
on every humane, that is, godly interest, represented 
in earthly activities, and have left the earth, to 
which the century nearest the Christ life gave such 
promise, on a moral plane so much lower than that 
promise. 

These centuries have, however, brought their 
lesson. Not until centuries had prepared the way 
for the announcement, perhaps as much through 
Greek culture in abstract science and in poetic 
forms of thought, as through the more sensuous, 
albeit often poetic forms of Hebrew thought, was 
the race ever told that God is spirit and seeketh 
such to worship Him as have risen to the plane of 
spiritual appreciation. 

It may be that the heavenly fire has been per- 
mitted to burn thus dimly in mere forms and creeds, 
in waiting for lessons which this age is teaching ; of 
the moral force there is in education, its cultivating, 
its creative power, its demonstration of the present 
and promising value of work ; its serviceableness in 
the production of the comforts and refinements of 
life ; the lessons also which the activities of com- 
merce bring to an actively intelligent age, by their 
development, through intensely active intercourse, 
of a sense of human interdependence, a sense of 



THE professor's PAPER. 161 

equity, justice, and truth, and of the indispensable- 
ness of these in the activities of life as well as on 
the spiritual planes. None of these lessons were 
taught by the institutions or systems so long under 
clerical supervision. 

Speaking after the manner of men, God seems to 
delight in co-partnerships with all moral forces. 
He seems willing to wait that "all things may work 
together for good". And so we of the hearth and 
plow-beam, the world, can welcome light from 
many trains of circumstances, some of them of 
wonderful significance in the history of these later 
centuries. 

As when the darkness of superstition and igno- 
rance covered the moral sun, a Moses, Elias, Daniel, 
Isaiah, by their characters and inspirations more 
than by their words, spelled out the words "Let 
there be light, revelation" ; so a Sidney, a William 
Penn, Franklin, Jefferson, Otis, Adams, Warren, 
Horace Mann, Whittier, Emerson ; at length Spur- 
geon, Phillips Brooks, Finney, Beecher, Swing, a 
respectable body of Scotch clergy and their sympa- 
thizers, developed the new light of freedom ; first, 
of political freedom, then the freedom of the divin- 
ity which is in and parcel of humanity, to battle 
directly against assumed "authority", the "divine 
right" to the exclusive exploitation of spiritual 
forces, and to the interpretation of the simple 
thoughts of God directed to the race. Under this 
political branch, which is but a branch of the tree 
of liberty, a nation has sprung to the van of the 



162 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

millennium's old civilizations in a century. Through 
freedom and the sense of responsibility it imposes 
on hale minds, and consequent effort toward a like 
common purpose, which seems coming to the age to 
stay, as freedom in education came half a century 
ago, to show the miracles of which the race is capa- 
ble, when free, and to show how easy it is for men 
to work together in a common purpose of real good, 
what may we not expect? 

And when men not only feel the privileges and 
responsibilities of freedom, but reach the higher 
point of realizing that religion is not a system of 
pronouncements by self-appointed councils, but that 
it has its eternal basis in each heart ; that, however 
sacred Sabbaths may be, they were made for man, 
and not man for the Sabbath ; that however great 
are temples, and that Avhich they represent, a man 
is greater than both, we shall have a basis for hu- 
mane, religious work. 

And when man is still further recognized as hav- 
ing now, to-day, as when first created in the image 
of God, such a divine nature as pronounces, with 
Christ, the supreme blessedness of active, fruitful 
righteousness, goodness, just as with Christ he af- 
firms that three times two are six, and through the 
same certainty of consciousness, not faith, and that 
this consciousness through experience, is the goal 
of faith and of religious teaching and attainment, 
then can our efforts become one with those of 
Christ and of his angels. 

The relation of experiences which brought all 



THE professor's PAPER. 163 

the members of our club, I do not say to these con- 
clusions, but to the clear convictions which lead to 
the confident expression of these conclusions, have 
been full of comfort to us all, as firmly establish- 
ing working lines for our efforts. Indeed, these re- 
citals grew to seem unnecessary except to establish 
a common recognition of the authority of scripture 
and reason on which they rest, and as showing the 
concert of thought and the identity of conclusions to 
which these relations tended. There is strong evi- 
dence that had the audiences been hundreds of 
thousands the same unanimity would have shown 
itself ; for, as if by a universal agreement, men 
seem to have ceased to look to sacerdotalism for 
light, or to try to gratify their spiritual sympathy 
along its lines of thought. I am informed by pub- 
lishers that all its treatises are a drug on the 
market, at half the prices they commanded five 
years ago, thus bankrupting the firms which have 
hitherto prospered by their sale. And this, while 
the sale of Bibles is multiplied by large factors. 
Blessed be women, through whom so much of this 
last comes. 

That all of the non-churchly classes are not in- 
different to these conditions, witness one of scores 
of similar letters : "We talked of progress, hoped 
it. Things in the rural districts are statu quo. Our 
county of sixteen six-mile townships has still its 
three to seven churches, of as many sects, in each ; 
sixty-two in all, besides those at the county seat. 
Some of these are served by tramp preachers, who 



164 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

pick their livings in four townships. Their con- 
gregations, in consequence, attend but twelve 
"services" a year, and are without Sunday schools. 
My business calling me about, I this year heard 
four times in one month the fully illustrated, tra- 
ditional, 'Christ stands in place of the sinner to 
receive the blow which justice directs against him'. 
Not one word of the new creature in Christ, sus- 
taining new relations to justice, and obviating the 
use of the sword. Is there nothing genuine in this 
direction? These men seem not to learn that, 
whatever heaven may be able to do with character 
so slipshod as what results from this teaching, and 
from the superficial motives which hold men apart 
In religious efforts, it never will build a kingdom 
of righteousness on earth, nor meet the old and 
new demands now made on American citizenship. 
Ignoring all these patriotic and humane considera- 
tions, those people who, and whose parents have 
enjoyed sweet religious experiences in some par- 
ticular church, seem unable to conceive the possi- 
bility of such heavenly delights in any other. So 
this expensive and obstructing disintegration of 
effort must continue to ramify all churchly enter- 
prises ; multiplying missionary boards, with their 
separate six-thousand-dollar secretaries, treasurers, 
solicitors, typewiters, office expenses, so that their 
name is legion w^ho utterly refuse to contribute to 
these "generous absorbents". This alienation of 
interest involves their colleges and other interests. 
Each sect, notwithstanding this, still asserts its 



THE professor's PAPER. 165 

Mohammed to be the only true prophet ; and so, 
large multitudes who are unwilling or unable to 
give the matter sufficient attention to see that all 
this lumber of partisan machinery is not of religion, 
but of such sinister interests as gather about politi- 
cal parties, even when the interests of the country 
are supremely urgent, become indifferent and drop 
into infidelity as to all religion. 

The well-meaning, really religious sectaries, whose 
name is legion of legions, seem also unable to see 
that Elijah, Elisha, Daniel, Isaiah; with Simeon, 
the Johns, James, and Paul, had delightful and 
profitable religious experiences, before creeds and 
their divisions were, and through faith in the simple 
truths of the gospel, through the operation of the 
simple life of Christ, as the "Living Word", "the 
Spirit of Truth", the "Manifestation" of the 
Father's love, and of His actively urgent interest in 
men. They are sometimes offended when told that 
their choice experiences came not from the accidents 
of their sectarian scaffoldings, but from the great 
Sun of Righteousness, whose healing, invigorating 
beams permeate every condition which occasions 
men to turn their faces toward it, and that these 
sectarian incidents, whatever their use may have 
been in the past, may now be safely and profitably 
studied in relation to their present efficiency in ad- 
vancing the interests of men (God's kingdom) in 
this professedly Christian, but largely French-infidel 
land. They seem to ignore the fact that their mul- 
ticipital partisan effort to convert Musselmans and 



166 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

heathen, carries on its face suspicion as to its mo- 
tive, and so renders the effort proximately as abor- 
tive as would two sets of paddle-wheels expensively 
moving in two directions. They seem to forget that 
Christ came not so much to call the righteous (them) 
to repentance as sinners ; not so much to promote 
their personal rapture as to redeem the world to 
righteousness. They forget that if Providence is 
calling them with trumpet tones to marshal all the 
religious influences with which they have been so 
long blest, to the work of Christianizing this land 
and building character, which shall, in turn, with 
might and main, help to civilize, Christianize the 
wards He is sending to our care. He is not thereby 
diminishing individual or club opportunity to pur- 
sue different lines of religious thought, or gain rap- 
turous experiences. 

What is still more astonishing, they forget that 
the ecstacy of the Pauls, the Johns, the Wesleys, 
the Whitefields, resulted less from their emotional 
prayers and enraptured songs than from the gratifi- 
cations they felt in God's blessing on their yearning 
desires, backed by giant, well directed, thoroughly 
sustained effort for the cause in which they were en- 
gaged. The ephemeral nature of their own rapture 
fed on other pabulum than this, and necessitating 
the repeated and often long continued simulation of 
ecstacy in prayer and song as a means, more or less 
hypnotizing, of attaining these rapturous conditions, 
should suggest this." 

As some argument in favor of our contentions, 



THE professor's PAPER. 167 

we refer to the improved condition of the working 
men and women among us ; their increased hope- 
fulness, courage, self-respect, personal and parental 
effort toward a higher life ; their easier and more 
trustful relations to the promoters and managers of 
industrial enterprises ; the greater efficiency and 
value of their work ; the more certain and valuable 
results of educational and religious effort in the 
county, noticeable in all classes ; the exceptional 
good order resulting from a sense of mutual inter- 
ests ; the reduction of criminal cases to zero ; the 
better opportunity for culture to all classes, from 
the multiplication of resources through a common 
and broader valuation set on culture ; the more cer- 
tain and effective development of individual genius ; 
less inclination on the part of farmers' boys to rush 
to the cities ; in short, the general increase of safety, 
efficiency, happiness, resulting from a quicker and 
more persistent sense of mutual interest and inter- 
dependence, as inculcated by Christ. We have, in- 
deed, daily increasing reasons for conjecturing that 
the kingdom of heaven on earth lies in the direction 
toward which this sympathy, this higher valuation 
of humanity as such, and this active sense of inti- 
mate and essential interdependence point. 

Our suggestions are here, of course, limited to 
rural districts. These cared for three-fourths of the 
work is done. The talent of the cities is adequate 
to its problems. 

Your speaker is strengthened in his hope that by 
a proper education of the people into this Christly 



168 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

thought of the essential interdependence of the 
members of the human family, the above conditions 
may be measureably realized, on the fact that within 
one lifetime he has witnessed evolutions greater than 
his contention implies. 

At all events, the sacerdotal scheme has had a 
millennium and a half to settle a half dozen ques- 
tions, which have inspired just interest enough to 
divide the religiously inclined into legions of liv- 
ings of varying values, from one hundred to two 
million dollars per annum. These divisions have 
finally led themselves to the famished state de- 
scribed by Dr. Sheldon Jackson in our second chap- 
ter. The quality of that product is set forth in 
the same chapter, in an extract from a popular cur- 
sent sermon, and by Dr. Phillips Brooks, also, as a 
telling "example of infidelity as to the beneficent 
purposes of God, and of the power of the simple 
life and activities of Christ, the living Word, to 
save men". 

Gentlemen, we of the hearth and plow-beam, we 
repeat it, are ready for something better than your 
wearying centuries of printed standards of religious 
literature have given us. We want God, as the 
God of the Bible and of reason presents Himself 
to us. Him we have known from our childhood 
and from the childhood of the race. His light 
shines into our hearts, around your standards, as 
the light of the physical world shines around Mer- 
cury in transit. We hear his voice : "I am the 
Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of 



THE professor's PAPER. 169 

Egypt, out of the house of bondage, who forgive th 
all thine iniquities, who healeth all thine infirm- 
ities. It was I who called, 'Come all ye weary, ye 
thirsting, ye hungering ; I will give you rest, the 
wells of eternal life, the bread of life'. It was I 
who said, * Blessed are the merciful, for it is they 
who shall obtain mercy' ; 'If a wicked man turn 
from his wickedness and doeth that which is right- 
eous, in the righteousness which he doeth, shall he 
live' ". Into the cauldron of this hot love, this 
divine interest in men, let fall your division walls. 
It will melt them as love dissipates the barrier be- 
tween the heart of a father and that of his long 
lost son. 

For our country, the pressure of our early emer- 
gencies and the new rallying cry, *' Freedom", kept 
us in genial, even loving comradeship, when we 
were three to five millions. We loved the country 
and worked for its good, while smiling at the sects 
as they threw stones at each other from pul- 
pits and missionary ships. We enjoyed our work 
and measurably prospered in it, although then the 
great popular school systems had not helped us to 
demonstrate how easy and natural it is for sensible 
people to work together for a recognized common 
good. The operation of human sympathy, and of 
personal appreciation between the members of fam- 
ilies of difi'erent church relations attending these 
schools, had not demonstrated how silly are the 
prejudices -which sectarian interests have engen- 
dered. Things are changed in this regard and 



170 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

otherwise. Tlie country feels the responsibilities 
of mature relations to the world and to the great 
problems of humanity. We are not only forty-five 
nations in one, containing formidable elements of 
danger, but we have taken to our halls and to our 
gate lodges four new nations, perhaps fifteen mil- 
lion people, not as slaves nor hired servants, but as 
wards. They come, hoping to be lifted to a higher 
political, intellectual and moral plane, under the 
to them new segis of religious and political liberty. 
The seriousness and the grandeur, first of a condi- 
tion of war, and now of the promise and the re- 
sponsibility of these new conditions, have, in a 
day, swallowed up sectional animosities and oblit- 
erated sectional lines, which, in fact, churchly bit- 
terness, on both sides of these lines, did more to 
generate and have done far more to keep alive than 
any other single element has done. It remains to 
be seen whether "the children of this world are 
still wiser than the children of light"; whether 
the new wards will be attacked by a single eff'ective 
bureau, or by a score of bureaus, fully equipped 
with their absorbent and abortive concomitants. 
Kingly rule, slavery, popular ignorance and drunk- 
enness have been swept away or greatly modified 
by the common sense of an inspired people, the 
churches being often on two sides of all these ques- 
tions. This has been accomplished largely through 
the interactions of social and patriotic inducements, 
and of other interests having, either directly or 
providentially, the same purpose as religion ; the 



THE professor's PAPER. 171 

common schools, the great universities, the educa- 
tional force there is in commerce and other indus- 
tries, promoting the sense of interdependence, ex- 
change of thought, personal esteem, sympathy, 
co-operation. There is room among these practical 
building forces for that supremely practical build- 
ing force represented by the simple, divinely hu- 
man life of Christ, whose intrinsic efficiency has 
been largely lost sight of in the exhaustive intes- 
tinal antagonisms of sects ; in which, in turn, 
without disparaging the efforts of legions of noble, 
godly workers, the world has lost its interest. 

A vision came to me. A youth was roaming the 
gardens of ease, when his eye caught, toward the 
top of a mountain, words seemingly defining the 
terrace plains they represented there . ' 'Education — 
mental discipline, knowledge, efficiency in fruitful 
work, human excellence". "Salvation, — a high 
condition of soul, nobility of soul, efficiency in 
fruitful work, humane (godly) excellence". 

On a terrace plain but little above the general 
level, and often, like the stone steps in "Drury 
Lane", worn to the level below, stood an old man. 
The youth made inquiries. "Yes, there are said to 
be such high plains as you speak of. Education, 
discipline, manly character? Yes, I have heard of 
them. You reach them through the merits of 
Euclid, the author of this book, 'imputed to you, 
and received by faith alone'. This plain I am on is 
the plain of 'faith alone' ". 

The youth turned pages of Euclid. "I find here 



172 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

the statement, Hhe square on the hypothenuse of a 
right triangle equals the sum of the squares on 
the other two sides'. Will you kindly show me 
how this appears?" "Oh, no; I know nothing 
of that. I received this book, as a system, 
by faith alone. That satisfies me. Mastering its 
principles or turning them to any practical use would 
savor of works, and works are anathema maranatha 
in our Articles and opinions, except such insignifi- 
cant, aimless eff'ort as may be counted as evidence 
that our faith is not dead. I find great comfort in 
the fact that Euclid has scaled the heights you see 
there, above, and that by faith alone in him, not in 
myself, who am as nothing, and have neither faith 
nor hope that it will ever be different with me on 
earth, I shall some day reach the heaven far above the 
groveling, work-a-day heights you see, and where I 
shall know all the principles of science and partake 
of all the blessings which these in any manner 
bring. I am led to this conclusion by analogy of 
reasoning in our most excellent system of theo- 
logical rhetoric invented by the * Fathers of the 
Church'". 

The youth, perplexed, went on, his eye still fixed 
on the height above, whence, at length a voice is- 
sued : "Not he who saith Lord, Lord, shall enter, 
but he that doeth the will of my Father. The 
harvests are ripe on these high plains, the reapers 
few. Work out your salvation, for God worketh in 
3^ou to do His will. To him that overcometh." 
The youth, inspired to faith and hope by these 



THE professor's PAPER. 173 

words, measured at a bound the terrace on which 
the old man had spent his life with so little result. 
At another bound he cleared the terrace of hope. 
Love inspiring him to zealous effort after genuine, 
practical wisdom and genuine, practical efficiency 
in goodness, he opened his Euclid, made its truths 
his own, grew in stature, and devoured other knowl- 
edge, and through vigorous work, of which he had 
also become enamored, his works soon began to fol- 
low him. Meantime, through reading the gos- 
pels of a living Christ, whose life sought to join 
itself to his life and to constitute in him a living, 
inspiring faith and hope, he became ruler over 
many departments and interests in life. The world 
moved under his disciplined mind and practiced 
hand. Looking back to the lowest terrace at the 
foot of the mountain, he saw the old man, still a 
pigmy, but still proud that he had never been en- 
ticed to strive for any thing but "imputed char- 
acter, received by faith alone.". 

But let us take courage. There are signs that 
education, honest, earnest, intelligent enterprise on 
the moral plane are outstripping traditional systems 
in the public esteem. Either the sectaries will see 
their every interest in laying aside the transmitted 
dicta of self-appointed medieval councils and will 
join in the march of beneficent progress, or the 
practical business intellect, accustomed to work 
under the guidance of reason, in accordance with 
the laws of cause and effect, and to hold expensive 
causes to account for commensurate effects ; and 



174 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

also familiar with the inspirations of the Almighty 
toward patriotism and humanity, w^ill organize, as 
we have tried to do, on the broad, high, all-em- 
bracing planes of life brought to view in the life 
and teachings of Christ, and familiarized to us in 
our every day higher reflections, aspirations, and 
experiences. 

In an age of rapid ocean transits, of hundred- 
mile-an-hour engines, of wireless telegraphs, of 
painless and X-E,ay surgery, and of prospective 
X-Ray printing, whereby men may think their 
thoughts on to a half million impatient folios a 
minute, — an almost divine fiat power, but well on 
toward which the steam-press lifts them, — the moral 
machinery whose fruits are the ashes deplored by 
Doctors Jackson and Talmadge (pages 17 to 22) 
will not suffice. Our friend, of the "The Atonement 
in Five Parts", quoted by Dr. Prince, will need a 
telescope to see the real world from the stagnant 
"slough of despond" in which his paganized theol- 
ogy has left his followers. We need the inspir- 
ing, transforming influence of the life of Christ. 

Paul's " Faith " and Christ's was not belief in creeds, 
But urgent, buoyant sense of man's supremest needs ; 
Clutch of the soul on Heaven's beatitude, 
As all unaliened life strives for its proper good; 
Like bursting impulse of the lark to sing, 
Or quivering passion for the loft in condor's wing; 
Substance of things not seen by mortal eye, 
But which profounder senses of the soul descry; — 
The sense of Beauty, Truth, Good, God, and their Infinity; 
Of man's high heirships, through his kinship to Divinity. 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 175 



CHAPTER YIII. 

PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT AND BUSINESS 
MANAGER, NOW PRESIDENT OF THE CLUB. 

Individual and social interdependence on all the planes of life, 
as taught by Christ, by every-day experience, and by a true 
social science. 

Thinking men are awaking to a better apprecia- 
tion of what is in store for the race "through a 
proper use of the means which God and nature 
have put into our hands". Thus an interesting 
fraction of the race made a discreet advance a cen- 
tury ago ; it threw off kingly rule. This in part 
enfranchised their minds from the fettering and de- 
grading influence of that whole class of arbitrary 
assumptions of "divine right" seemingly funda- 
mental to autocratic and ecclesiastical "authority". 

A century of experience has taught, however, 
that men, as mere gregarious animals, only capable 
of being swayed through their lower nature, are 
not as such able to exercise, nor are they entitled to, 
the larger and responsible privileges of an advanced 
humanity. It is found that true freedom is a high 
condition resulting from well-defined principles of 
social being. It would be possible for several thor- 
oughly skilled musicians to play, even to improvise 
in the same room. Not so with unskilled men. 



176 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Thus considered, the opening of the political doors 
so widely as America has done, brings its weighty 
and complicated problems. Faith in the ultimate 
success of this experiment now rests on the almost 
astonishing indications that the high culture and 
the lofty character already attained under free insti- 
tutions appreciate the conditions and stand ready 
to attempt whatever work even the present situa- 
tion forces upon them. Witness, besides the free 
school, the especially promising facts growing out 
of the conviction that the chances for free institu- 
tions and desirable popular conditions are vastly 
multiplied in proportion as higher learning and 
thoroughly disciplined character can enlarge their 
spheres relatively to dangerous tendencies. 

In the above connection, the idea is dawning that 
man's exclusive, or even primary interest as an in- 
habitant of earth, is not in a distant heaven, so 
zealously exploited by the sacerdotal system. Since, 
in the development of social science, men have 
come to realize that individual and family culture 
and well being are indissolubly connected with gen- 
eral social conditions, it becomes daily clearer that 
the narrowest and widest interest and duty of the 
individual is to work with intelligent purpose to 
promote the good of each person and family — his 
own for the good of all, first — and to work against 
what is harmful to all, as these things have rela- 
tion to now and here. He has a right to insist 
that others now enjoying the blessings of society 
shall do the same. Each has a right, for example, 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 177 

to expect the protection of the best possible human 
laws. But a statutory enactment is not a law, 
either for protection or support, if not in accord- 
ance with the sentiments of a majority of a com- 
munity, with regard to its Tightness and justness. 
It would lack the support of a representative grand 
jury, and be a dead letter. Human law, therefore 
must, in a free community, be understood to mean 
the authoritative enactment of the principles of 
right and justice, as these principles are developed in 
the current thought of the community. 

Every individual, then, and family, x^as an inter- 
est, strong in proportion to the activity of his indi- 
vidual and social consciousness, in the development 
of the genuine principles of right and justice in 
the mind of every member of the community. He 
has a right to demand this of every individual and 
of every institution that asks his respect and sup- 
port. As a social being he is interested in nothing 
any more than in this ; especially since what is 
called public opinion is law, with commands and 
prohibitions which, if less formal, are not less au- 
thoritative than legal enactments. As law it en- 
clasps us, as this newly talked of ether enclasps 
each atom of matter. It performs for us the most 
intimate offices, and it is thus more than law. It 
is the governess in our homes, the instructor and 
character-builder in our schools and public assem- 
blies, our meets and socials. As an all-pervading 
presence the reek it sends forth infests every room 
in our dwellings. Its sweet, gracious and nourish- 



178 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

ing influences bring us all good, and bring us espe- 
cial satisfaction and pleasure in proportion to our 
contribution to its resources. 

In promoting, then, a spirit of solicitous and pa- 
ternal or fraternal justice and humanity toward all, 
including the struggling classes, we are creating a 
general condition of health and safety which can 
be secured in no other way. However foreign to 
us these matters may seem, they are of our very 
life, and their interests are more and more inti- 
mately our own as social activities become compli- 
cated. These conditions of our individual life affect 
its fibre and quality, and thus help to determine its 
place on the spiritual plane here, and its destiny 
hereafter. They thus, also largely constitute our 
means of influencing the present and eternal des- 
tiny of others. They support or they nullify our 
prayers. 

The disposition and ability to take an effective 
part in shaping public sentiment for good, then, 
shows itself as one of the highest attributes of our 
nature. We see that to do less than the best we are 
capable of doing is not only to be guilty of spong- 
ing and obtaining good without return, but it is to 
be guilty of treason against society, our family, the 
possibilities within us, against heavenly interests, 
and especially against God, who is more intensely 
interested in the exhibition of His own image and 
attributes in humanity than in all other concerns of 
the universe. Into what other interest has He put 
so much of His love and loving work? To make us 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 179 

partakers of His glory, in this His most glorious 
work of developing for all eternity the activity of 
His attributes in men, and thus to fill the earth and 
the heavens with the true glory of the Lord, for 
forty years and forty centuries has he borne with 
our fitful, tortuous gropings in the wilderness that 
we might, at length, through desperate hunger of 
soul for these conditions of perfection and true har- 
mony with our own natures, with social interests 
and with God, put forth those activities to attain 
them which are not only the price of them to us, 
but are an essential part of their living, spiritual 
essence. 

Our inherent self-interest is thus reconciled with 
self-respect and with the teachings of a true social 
science, leading not only to the highest individual 
good, but also to the highest common good. Our 
individuality, indeed, is and is to be the starting 
point, the primal spring of our activities, the dis- 
tinctive method of our being. The activities and 
possibilities of our faculties must look toward the 
furtherance of our personal existence, our personal 
interest and good. They are in no way to be dis- 
paraged for this fact, and Christ nowhere dispar- 
ages them. Thus only do they look toward the 
highest interests of society, since the best and high- 
est gift a man can make to society is himself, with 
these personal interests and this personal good se- 
cured. 

Herein is also seen the transcendent and eternally 
active wisdom of the Creator, whose first definition 



180 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS, 

of man is that lie is a being not made to live alone. 
Indeed God created man not a man — a man lacks of 
being man as a twig lacks of being the tree. God 
proclaims this in the dual form and functions of the 
race. Speech, the power of modulating speech to 
express tenderness, interest, love, sympathy, or in- 
difference ; the sense of harmony as the product of 
several individual voices ; the very capacity of vocal 
and of instrumentally produced sounds to be com- 
bined into enrapturing harmonies ; the multitudi- 
nous wants of the individual and the distinctive capa- 
city of each individual to meet only one, or at most, 
only a few of his own wants and of the wants of his 
family ; these facts of creation tell us that the indi- 
vidual man is and is to be a necessarily related part 
of something larger which is to be organized out of 
related and auxiliar members — the aggregate man, 
societv. 

Instead of this social obligation's signaling our 
bondage or any imperfection or limitation of our 
life, behold the grandeur of its wise beneficence. 
My very incapacity to create more than one of the 
thousand things I want as a civilized man, multi- 
plies a thousandfold my capacity to enjoy them all, 
through the enlargement of myself by the sympa- 
thies and reciprocal interests which the interchanges 
occasioned by these interdependent conditions create. 
The cunning fact that it is to the personal interest 
of a thousand ambitious, skillful fellow workers to 
put forth all their inventive and creative power to 
meet my wants, or to perfect the instrument essen- 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 181 

tial to supplement my efforts toward the gratifica- 
tion of a clierislied ambition ; to make for me an 
instrument through which my musical genius may 
enrapture them, or my surgical skill save a hun- 
dred lives ; and that I may make all this my own 
in absolute legal and moral right, by the contribu- 
tion of a single supplementary fruit of my effort, 
is a most comforting evidence of the wisdom and 
the loving dispositions of Jehovah as a governor in 
the world of life. In capacity and opportunity to 
enjoy the fruits of human activity and purpose, it 
makes me a thousand men in one, even on this 
plane. The history of the development of knowl- 
edge and science demonstrates the same conditions 
on the intellectual planes, since even the sciences 
are wisely so interlinked that progress in develop- 
ing each depends on a movement along the whole 
line. 

An unprejudiced study of the subject from the 
point of social and economic view we have reached 
may reveal to us a glimpse of the eternal depths of 
joy which await these conditions on the moral 
plane. He who holds the worlds in eternal grand- 
eur of harmony through the simplicity of recipro- 
cal attractions, interactions, work, for which He 
has cunningly provided, would hold the moral 
world to the expression of the same magnificent 
harmony, through the application of the same 
great law of conscious individual interdependency, 
reciprocal interest, self-urged reciprocal service. 
For there is not only a cunning Creator who bal- 



182 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

ances the worlds about His finger, a just God who 
presides over the destinies of nations and plans for 
the individual and social wants of man, there is a 
God who is spirit, from which goes forth the con- 
stant effluence of a fatherly love. But love is not 
only effluent ; it yearns for reciprocation ; it seeks 
spiritual, worshipful appreciation, sympathy and 
responsiveness in its beneficent purposes. All good 
purposes are forms of love ; and the purpose of the 
divine love is to lift into the sphere of its own per- 
fections of goodness and love, His image in man, 
whom He has created to be the object of this in- 
terest. 

Thus the reciprocal activities of love constitute 
the bond of union throughout the moral universe, 
not only, but they constitute heavenly phenomena, 
hereafter. "As a hen gathereth her chickens under 
her wings" ; not through the low plane principle 
of obedience, but through the draft and sweet re- 
sponsiveness of love. God thus lives in all the 
universes. They live only in him. In the moral 
universe He lives effusively, in the draft and incite- 
ments of His love. The perfection of finite being 
is to live and move in Him responsively to His di- 
vine attractions. Being Himself perfect, as we 
come through another road to see. He can not work 
to perfect Himself, nor can men add to His perfec- 
tions. It is therefore of His very life, essential to 
it, from our point of view, to work to perfect the 
moral universe, which exists from and in Him. 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 183 



How, then, have we life in Him except in the same 
divine effort of good? 

To reveal this as the method of divine life, Christ 
came, and He did so reveal it. "For herein is my 
Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit". And 
this is the teaching of all scripture. See Isaiah, 
V, 7 ; Ix, 21 ; xxvi, 15, and many other passages. 
Thus in whatever else God may be interested, there 
can be no subject in which he is or can be so inter- 
ested on earth as in the growth of manly, godly 
character. In what, then, can His followers be so 
much interested? What more worthy object can 
engage their attention, standing, as it does, as the 
very crown of God's glory, as that glory assumes a 
veritable shape in a human mind? 

And what more royal pledge can we have that he 
has never thrown any obstacle in the way of any 
man in this regard, not only, but also that the re- 
sources of the universe will be at the disposal of 
every parent who hears his command : "Train up 
a child in the way he should go, and when he is old 
he will not depart from it"? What more royal 
pledge can we have that He will be our ever present 
help in our efforts toward the building up of those 
perfections of character in and through which He 
seeks His own glory? 

This principle of interdependence is thus seen to 
connect all moral being. It is the common attri- 
bute of moral being. Without disparaging Deity, 
this sense of common interest exalts and glorifies 
man. This reasoning, like the divinely human life 



184 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

by wMcli it is inspired, is intended to raise the 
plane of humanity very near to that of divinity. 
If the reasoning has failed, the fact remains, and 
is still exemplified in the Christly life. He never 
represented heaven as afar off. "The kingdom of 
heaven is within you". Though the Son of God, 
He was a son of man. Though a son of man, He 
claimed, without blasphemy, to be the Son of God. 
He never represented His divinity as far-fetched. 
If He cast out devils, cleansed lepers, healed the 
sick. He told His disciples, "greater things than I 
do ye may do". Has any human being, indeed, 
except Paul, perhaps, and possibly Homer, appre- 
ciated what it is to bear the image of God. 

All that we contend for may be true and eternity 
be too short to span the infinity of God, either in 
man's experience or conception. But however 
meager the manifestation of the divine in man, is 
it nothing that it is divine, and that it is destined 
to grow eternally? The Greeks did not so think. 
To them "enthusiasm" meant the gods in man; 
and we have but to read the history of their best 
days to see what this appreciation did for them. 
This inspiration was the purpose of the Iliad to 
the Greeks, and it accomplished its end. And 
when the truth comes in higher form in the evolu- 
tions of history, is it nothing? Indeed, may we 
not have lost sight of God in Greek history, also? 
For what miracle of history surpasses in achieve- 
ment or fruitage that work of a handful of inspired 
Greeks, who, without realizing it, probably, pre- 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 185 

vented the overwhelming of Greek civilization, 
which was destined to bless Europe and then un- 
born America? Or when did history present a 
more ennobling and inspiring lesson as to the trans- 
cendent value of even comparatively high moral 
qualities than in just transpired events? It is not 
too much, indeed, to claim that in a very large and 
real sense this Spanish war was a war of character 
against creed. 

But not less important, as a study for character 
builders, is another thought to which our progress 
leads us. It has been said that the four gospels 
touch but about three days of Christ's earthly life. 
It could hardly be imagined that any thing would 
be touched on in such an epitome, except topics of 
supreme moment to then present and future gen- 
erations. But what do we find? No effort, as we 
have said, to deal in the wonderful and the super- 
natural. His main purpose, it might be almost 
said, was to raise our humblest activities to the 
dignity of godly virtues. 

It has also been said by one who has often hit a 
telling truth when he has confined himself to criti- 
cising the ecclesiasticism of the day, instead of 
Christianity, that Jesus did not teach the domestic 
virtues. Let this philosopher study the glance, 
which is but a glance of that life, whether the 
above statement as to time is literally true or not, 
to see verified this activity of His divine love to- 
ward all the interests of our earthly life. *'He was 
obedient to His parents" — the perfection of a vir- 



186 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

tuous, domestic character. At twelve years of age 
He turns lovingly and reverently to quiet the pater- 
nal anxiety, though He was about His heavenly 
Father's business, trying to win to goodness and 
love the unsympathizing, sneering priests and rab- 
bis, who were but yesterday quoted in the pulpit 
as authority outweighing Christ's manly loyalty to 
domestic virtue, as shown in His effort to emanci- 
pate woman from Semitic enthrallment. He throws 
a halo of glory around the domestic affections in 
His intercourse with the family of Lazarus, and in 
other cases. His last thought in the agonies of the 
crudest of deaths was solicitous care for His 
mother. Christ also showed this sedulous care of 
love toward the simplest and remotest objects of it, 
by "cleansing lepers, giving sight to the blind and 
healing all manner of sicknesses", as a fitting pre- 
lude to, if I may not rather say as a suggestive 
sample of that "kingdom of heaven on earth" 
which He is about to recommend. His system is 
thus shown to embrace all the planes of life as in- 
separable and founded on a common philosophy 
and moral intention. Descend to the lowest inter- 
ests of humanity, and "Lo Thou art there". 

Neither ambition nor greed is more busy on the 
eagerest city streets than is this simple fragment of 
Christ's life with loving effort on all the planes of 
our human life, to comfort men and to direct their 
footsteps toward the portals of eternal life. And 
when he declares that belief with Him in this 
power of love to effect all good, is eternal life, since 



PAPER OP THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 187 

it alone hits the true pathway and philosophy of 
life, not in three days, but in three seconds, He 
sweeps the whole horizon of human interests, lifts 
the curtain which has limited our experiences, and 
gives men a taste of heaven itself. For these reve- 
lations He made Himself the child of humanity, 
the Son of Man. He identifies Himself with hu- 
manity to realize to man how man may daily more 
and more identify humanity with divinity. "Thou 
in Me and I in them, that we all may be glorified 
together". *' Greater works than these shall ye 
do". *'As I lay down my life that I may take it 
again, so he that loseth or layeth down his life 
among the living interests of humanity shall take 
it again a hundred fold". 

The presence of a wealthy youth who has care- 
fully fulfilled the requirements of society and the 
law, suggests to him another phase of this science 
of life. As the statutes of the state are a part of 
every contract made by men, so history is a part of 
all social doctrine. History represents what is, 
and is to be provided for and provided against. 
For example, the history of India represents the 
tendency of society to disintegrate itself, that is, 
to destroy itself as society, by segregating all 
wealth and all privileges out from the mass to the 
few, a class. His clear eye sees this danger to so- 
ciety. He sees also for the individual that the as- 
sumption of individual independence, whether by 
crime or criminal indifference, is an act of indi- 
vidual outlawry, a resignation of all claim to the 



188 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

real beneficences of the social state. Though the 
wealthy hermit may have individual companions, 
and these may, by their wealth, secure protection 
for a time for their individual interests and assumed 
privileges, he and they are excrescences on the 
social body, which by its very instinct of self-pres- 
ervation constantly threatens and endangers these 
interests. *'If thou wouldst really enter into life 
and be truly blest", says Christ, *'sell of what thou 
hast and identify thyself with the world of sympa- 
thies and affections about thee. 'Love alone is the 
fulfillment of the law of life'. .Only on its planes 
is real life. Gold and glitter are of the lowest 
plane of sensuous existence. They are *of the 
earth, earthy'. Its interests, merely as such, have 
never been promised the protection of the eternal 
verities". 

The aphorisms familiar on its planes are but the 
veneer of truth, and in the furnace heat of emer- 
gency they may become as nothing. To the thief's 
excuse culled from these lower-plane aphorisms, 
*'One must live, you know", Tallyrand's answer 
from the higher plane, "I don't know that, I know 
that one must be honest", samples, perhaps the sur- 
prises that may yet sound from clearer skies than ours 
to the claims of unlimited individual freedom to ex- 
tract from the people in a life-time one five-thous- 
andth of the wealth of America, for example, or to 
secure an individual annual income of one one- 
thousandth, the net annual gains of America. 
While individual freedom of action to an unlimited 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 189 

extent has always been recognized in the axioms of 
political economy, yet no one has recorded his dis- 
sent from the protest of Horace, uttered centuries 
ago, and which Kome had done well to heed : 
^'' Modus in rebus ; Sunt certi denique fi7ies , 
Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.^ ^ 
There is a proper moderation in things ; there are 
at last limits beyond and this side of which right 
ceases. 

Christ, indeed, every-where shows His tender re- 
gard for, not only the family but the country, the 
land of His fathers, of His birth. Traversing with 
the friends of His youth, its beautiful hills and val- 
leys, sitting in sweet communion at its historic 
fountains, or enjoying the charms and hospitalities 
of its homes. He bewails, with the most pathetic 
affection, and as with personal pain, its pending 
fate. *'How often would I have gathered thy chil- 
dren together as a hen gathereth her chickens under 
her wings". He thus recognizes and emphasizes 
the claims and the pleasures of our related, inter- 
dependent interests, and sanctifies patriotism and 
the social and family affections as divine. 

And full of beautiful instruction also is the sug- 
gestion that under God's all-wise purpose of good, 
this sympathy and pleasing sense of correlation and 
interdependence runs through all nature. Cold 
steel seeks its cynosure. In the realm of instinct, 
which is most manifestly pregnant with God's 
thought, the suggestion furnishes a forceful object 
lesson to reason and the spiritual senses, Virgil, 



190 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

the pagan poet of the fields, aptly apostrophizes 
this sentiment : 

" Sic vos non vobis nidijicatis aves ; 
Sic vos non vobis velera feriis oves; 
Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes ; 
Sic vos non vobis fertis atrara boves.^^ 

Ye birds and sheep, ye bees and gentle kine, 

With God's ordainment falUng into Hne, 

All work for each and each again for all ; 

Content, e'en rapturous in your native thrall. 

Nests brought from far, wools, sweets, the powdered soil, 

Not for yourselves, — attest your generous toil. 

Meanwhile, as the realization of the highest in- 
dividual conditions requires the development of 
man's diviner potentialities, so to realize to society 
its best, requires the evolution of its choicest forces. 
Men have been accustomed to fight their battles by 
the muscles of mailed giants. Under the new 
regime the foes of society are to be sent to school, 
to learn in a single term, as the Spanish nation has 
just done, the superior might of free intelligence 
and high individual aims and purposes as efi'ective 
integers in a common purpose and effort for the 
good of all. While, even to-day, "defenders of the 
faith" stand in rabbinnical mail and with medieval 
weapons, over castles from which the spirit and life 
have long since departed, the newly awakened spir- 
itual forces are quietly flanking dead issues and 
leaving their mole-eyed defenders in ^Hnnocuous 
desuetude'' \ 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 191 

111 the breadth and universality of the work of the 
W. C. T. U., which, as they record, "began with 
the temperance crusades, those whirlwinds of the 
Lord which have spread so fast and far, drawing 
into their mighty circles of power good women of 
many lands, for the protection of homes, no matter 
whose or where, nor by what evil threatened", we 
seem to be treading again the ways traced by that 
gentle representative of heavenly forces on earth. 
There comes also the living substance of God's 
thought; I "will make him a help, like himself, 
standing over against him, or before him, with 
equal and supplemental characteristics" (see 
Clark's Commentary) . 

An edict (recently quoted approvingly in the 
pulx3it) went forth from the rabbis that "Access to 
the law should be forbidden to women", and such 
translations and interpretations of it as Semitic 
chivalry (?) chose to give were meted out to her. 
Under these sinister expositions woman has been 
buried during most of the world's history, and with 
her the divinest forces of the race. 

In various fields woman is now most efficiently 
assisting to remove the bolts and bars from the 
castle of prejudice and to open the way out to 
clearer light and purer air. While men are still 
busied with the defense of professional dogmas and 
are chary about meddling with what has not the 
traditional ring, she, alert for the new life which 
Christ's first coming promised, spends the first 
morning hour which is hers with open eye and 



192 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

listening ear for evidence of his promised reappear- 
ance. If, even as the child of her wish, she seems 
to herself to discover signs of a new dawn, the 
latter day event prophesied by Malachi, "The rising 
of the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His 
wings", she is at least entitled' to her opportunity. 
Let her alone. The race has lived centuries enough 
since Christ announced the new truth that "God is 
Spirit and seeketh such to worship Him as are able 
to rise to the spiritual appreciation of truth", for 
some result to be realized. If, after eighteen cen- 
turies, men are yet too gross and material for the 
effectual exploitation of spiritual forces upon them, 
a more direct and intense effort to hasten this con- 
dition is certainly suggested. Men who commend 
the Bible as a guide can certainly respect the child- 
like spirit which leads her to make it the subject of 
her almost exclusive study. It should not be an 
unwelcome statement, that of Mr. Moody, that 
many more Bibles are now sold than even ten 
years ago, or that sectarian literature is a drug 
on the market at half its price ten years ago, so 
that large firms dealing in them have become bank- 
rupt. 

In this reaction we shall not forget also that God 
created the race male as well as female. Our con- 
tention, indeed, is for the greater predominance of 
sturdy forces in the moral field. I would not free 
woman from her centuries of unchristian, unphilo- 
sophical "subjection to man" out of sentiment 
alone, but for profoundly divine uses. Man is not 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 193 

to become more effeminate by co-operation in cer- 
tain fields with women, but the contrary. 

For some reason the largest moiety of men seem 
to have left this field of sacerdotal sovereignty. Is 
it because woman, in her accustomed fetters, has 
been the only element willing to submit to the ef- 
feminate methods of this plane? But true woman- 
hood worships virility ; and, emancipated, she may 
demand such a more stalwart treatment of the 
moral interests of society as shall win back to the 
most weighty of human concerns a manly alliance 
of all the moral forces of the race. 

It must be that the time is coming when a 
sturdy, self-reliant manhood shall find a glory 
neither short-lived nor regretful in leading an ag- 
gressive march from effeminacy, division and dis- 
cord toward the new kingdom of recognized com- 
mon and ever-deepening interests. That day will 
be when society shall more clearly recognize its 
right to battle in its own interests against sinister, 
disintegrating influences, expensive, inefficient 
methods, and against all oppressive power. This 
condition is not likely to be brought about by those 
who have hitherto shown themselves as chiefly con- 
cerned to serve and to serve themselves of vested 
rights in the old organizations. It will certainly 
not begin with the Pope of Rome and his cardinals, 
nor with the pope of England and her prelates, 
with their enormous and heartlessly cruel extor- 
tions. And if not there, will the smaller divisions 
and incomes be given up, for the petty purpose of 



194 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

saving the world ; as we have occasionally seen the 
divisions given up for a fortniglit to save a county 
from the curse of rum-selling? And if these are 
not to move, will the age fear to ignore them, at 
length, and strive to rally the new forces, as yet 
unincumbered by the Nessus shirt of sectarianism, 
so hopeless in its disposition of tenacity ; while 
yet to all eyes but their own, each sect is hopelessly 
impotent to convince its nearest friends the other 
side of the wall, either of the truth or the signifi- 
cant importance of its petty differentiations. 

Many of these forces are now ready for service, 
as we have seen in the incident referred to in our 
"Professor's paper", regarding the "secular" or- 
ganization of the public school machinery in many 
states. This incident itself leads toward the sug- 
gestion, as do many of our County Club experi- 
ences, that the new organization will, by degrees, 
if not directly, embrace a grouping of more and 
broader interests than do those organizations which 
announce that their main dependence and effort are 
on the hour-a-week Sunday-school, which promises 
to keep full their respective church rolls. 

Very bitter experiences as well as some splen- 
did triumphs show the advantage of a habit of asso- 
ciated thought and effort. In the direst emergen- 
cies it has been impossible for a community to find 
itself, so as to be able to select the proper leaders to 
seize responsibilities and protect the common inter- 
est. Indeed the power of combinations to oppress 
the people arises not more out of the preparedness 



PAPER OP THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 195 

of the enemy than out of the unpreparedness of the 
people to defend themselves by enforcing right and 
justice. 

For example, a few years ago the publishers of 
school-books were impoverishing themselves by 
competition. They combined, and were then able 
to prey on the people. But educational interests 
had been organized, in Ohio, for example, and 
through their agents, the legislature, were able to 
act. The state had so much interest in the con- 
tinued supply of skillfully manufactured books that 
it had no temptation to suggest any but absolutely 
fair and just terms. The cases of railways and 
other related activities are identical with this. 

Cotton buyers are organized and successfully con- 
form to conditions, sometimes buying for less than 
the crop costs the producers, who have blindly over 
produced. The planters are organized neither in re- 
lation to the buyers nor to related producing interests. 
They can not by a common agreement check the 
over production of cotton nor effectually stimulate 
the production of foods in the cotton region. They, 
therefore, can make no terms with the buyers. Last 
year the logical catastrophe followed, and the pro- 
ducers have not yet found whether there is any 
bottom to this year's ruin. It remains to be seen 
whether man's extremity will be recognized as God's 
opportunity to teach the wisdom to cover, as our 
organized county has done, ten acres of every farm 
near the railways with fruit trees, and all the hills 
of the county with proper breeds of cattle and sheep. 



196 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

meeting the good and improving markets for these, 
and better preparing the soils for grains. The de- 
termination of this question will decide whether that 
region shall become, with its now growing manu- 
facturing interests, the most prosperous and de- 
lightful region on the globe, or whether apathy 
shall continue to preside at the tragedy of ruin. 
The folly of permitting a few politicians to wreck 
such an organization need not be repeated. It 
would seem easy to see that one side only of a two- 
sided interest organized the other side must suffer. 

The management of related interests, seems, in- 
deed, divinely intended to develop social qualities, 
justice, sympathy, the sense of equity, of interde- 
pendence, of right. Thus every human interest is 
a humane interest, a moral interest. While one- 
sided organization may tend to injustice and op- 
pression, two-sided, or juxtaposed organization 
tends, through propositions for compromise and 
the discussion of these, to promote the considera- 
tion of the principles of justice and right, to obviate 
injustice, wrong, oppression, suffering, wretched- 
ness ; social intercourse well directed to proper 
ends promotes larger views of right, better under- 
standings, sympathy, culture, higher civilization, 
good. 

While this is by no means all that may be said 
of organization in relation to social harmony and 
human happiness, it is sufficient to raise it toward 
the plane of the sacraments, and to fix our obliga- 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 197 

tion, duty, privilege, regarding it, a fourth sacra- 
ment, let us say. 

Organization was God's way out of chaos. The 
whole contention of this paper is toward the con- 
clusion that it is the only way out of moral chaos, 
chance, constantly imminent injustice, oppression, 
ruin. God works by means, and intelligent means 
suits His purpose best. 

The W. C. T. U. organized against rum-selling. 
No one will suffer, the whole world will be blessed 
in their success. Women are organizing their 
yearning potencies into clubs and federating these 
clubs against organized evils, and already the stars 
of hope are blending into a sheen. 

The sacerdotal interests are organized, and these 
organizations are so far federated that they control 
public opinion so that half of their railroad and 
steamboat fare is charged to you and me ; and so is 
part of the price of their religious literature, and 
of the just profits of retail booksellers. In the 
same way they thwart any responsive reading as to 
the prescribed scope of religion in relation to hu- 
man interests, the enforcement of right and truth 
in practical life. On the whole religious side of 
life the slipper in the closet assumes to outweigh 
the ponderous logic of practical out-of-door life, 
and all religious effort resolves itself, as we have 
said, into the manipulation of the hour-a-week 
nursery for the hour-a-week audience. The power 
to do all this results from organization. 

Our contention is for all that is good in this and 



198 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

a hundred fold more. The effort of our club has 
been to organize all human interests and activities 
right-ward, truth-ward, heavenward, and not only 
to instruct and persuade men, but to instruct and 
persuade all the interests, events, dealings, devices 
of the community, so that they shall co-operate 
with moral, humane, religious contentions. 

This supposes, not combination merely, but or- 
ganization over and about one controlling purpose 
or more, with personal members, conscious and 
recognized as competent to perform certain uses 
along these purposed lines. Here the teacher, the 
promoter of moral and intellectual activities, have 
their place of vantage, only authoritative as truth 
and justice are always authoritative. Plato's Re- 
public? No; Christ's Republic; the Republic of 
reason ; each man with his talent or talents, and 
his chance to use them, but fed with the sympathy 
of a common intention of life, a common sense of 
our relation to each other, to humanity, to God. I 
need not enlarge on this thought with the growing 
purpose of the women's clubs before us, and the as 
yet broader purposed activities and results of our 
own club open to practical study. Thus, in com- 
ing back to Christ's thoughts and methods, we 
shall refuse, as He did, to shut our eyes to what- 
ever concern tends to make a man, in his earthly 
relations to the entire humanity, yet leaving him 
with perfect freedom and opportunity to discuss, 
investigate, and to appropriate truth from all 
sources. 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 199 

lb is scarcely necessary to bring proof to any in- 
telligent reader, that of the fourteen persons whose 
views are incidentally referred to or recited in these 
chapters (which are to be published, as I learn), 
each has been a lifelong, unchallenged member of 
one of eight leading orthodox churches. Indeed, 
every one knows scores of active-minded church 
members, among them leading clergymen, who 
have for years entertained the most advanced views 
here unstintedly and unhesitatingly presented, as 
facts of history and not as rallying points of belief. 
So little does the letter of the creeds now stand in 
the way of the position that the time has at length 
come when Christianity may, arise bodily from the 
plane of dogma and the churchly defense of dogma 
to the plane of patriotism and humanity, as repre- 
sented in Hebrew recitals and in the simple activi- 
ties and precepts of *'The Living Word" ; and 
which also constitute the only practicable effort to 
glorify God. The larger thought of the day thus 
recognizes, either openly or by implication, that 
God's shoreless ocean of truth can no longer be 
compressed into a thimble, and that the New Testa- 
ment and the spirit of love it inspires may be 
trusted more certainly than can the pronounce- 
ments of self-constituted medieval councils and the 
party spirit they engender, to guide men to right- 
eousness. 

And is it too much to say that, with the century's 
training to high, manly purpose, through a sense 
of freedom and its responsibilities and inspirations, 



200 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

through education, forum and rostrum discussions, 
successful patriotic and social reforms and progres- 
sive movements, through large opportunities for 
world-wide intercourse, all of which God's gift of 
freedom and its incidents has occasioned to Amer- 
ica, — with all this training, and with the added 
providential motives presented in these late months 
so crowded with large humane and patriotic activi- 
ties, the indications are indisputable of God's pur- 
pose leading in the direction of this sublime unity 
of enterprise? 

A GLIMPSE OF THE MORNING. 

Lo a glint of a diamond-tipped wing, 

Of a bevy that float and alight 
On the rim of the morning to sing 

A glad carol at burial of night. 

Out of night, goblin night, have been born 
Earnest hosts for the strife that shall be. 

Golden dust from their wheels marks the morn 
Which men, watch-worn, were wasting to see. 

Tired with weaving, in synod and session, 
Fruitless, pagan-bred schemes that shall save; 
(Like enchantments which hold from the grave), 

Vested cov'nants and rights of succession, 
Blood placations of wrath, forms of lave; 

Men turn ear to a voice hoarse with shouting 
" He'who doeth the truth, he shall know ; 
(He that worketh toward life, he shall grow)." 

So evanish the groping and doubting. 

And the gloaming seems changing to glow. 



PAPER OF THE MECHANICAL EXPERT, ETC. 201 

Only work, then, finds gospel -which aids men ; 

Turn a talent, then govern a state. 

(Man is noble through wit to create) ; 
Artists, scholars, and farmers, and tradesmen, 

Gain dominion and power, grappling fate. 

So Elijah and Willard, while doing 
The purpose which came to their hand, 
(Lifting heavenward the tribes of their land). 

Come on Wisdom the self path pursuing, 
With her legions, all " yours to command." 

Truths were born to the Roundheads in battle 
For free thought and plain rights for plain folk ; 
(Truths in lies, hap, like gems in rough rock) ; 

Yet these shone in each boor's earnest prattle, 
Whilst the prelates but ravaged God's flock. 

Conscious kinship to victors in heaven ; 

Sense of heirship to* all that is best ; 

(Like an eagle's born up-soaring zest) ; 
These their truths, once at Bethlehem given, 

To " draw men " as they '■ lifted up " Christ. 

So our hosts, when, with manly emprise, 
They were forth, feeding lambs, sowing grain; 
(Sure that heaven will send sunshine and rain) ; 

Hail this oriflamme, straight from the skies: 
"And their works, these do follow them in ; " 

Hear in voices that whispered the seer ; 

In the " Word " which incarnates God's plans; 

(Shunted long for devices of clans) ; 
This pledge royal of help and of cheer : 

'• God seeks his own glory in man's." 



202 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

POEMS. 

Awakening of Endymion. — Reconciling the World to Himself. — 
Where Shall We Find Him?— A Primer of History.— The 
Helpmeet. — As Others See TJs. — Suppose. — Character Build- 
ers. — Just Turned Eleven. — Foils for Adversity. — Chivalrie. — 
The Strans:e Host. — The Golden Age. — Spring and the Crit- 
ics. — The American Autumn. — The Civil War, a Millennium- 
breeding Episode. — Old Gloria. 

AWAKENING OF ENDYMION. 

Each part may call the fartherest brother; 
For head with foot hath private amitie, 
And all with all the world beside. 

' — George Herbert. 

For me sweet brooks no longer sing? 

No springs and groves of bursting wing, 

No whitening glint of coming wing, 

No low-voiced lute of weird repute. 

Charm through my pen? 
Nay, then, have youth's more ardent themes 
Broken of our Endymion 's dreams 

The lengthened train? 

Can genius reach, in lofty rhyme, 
Interests more stirring and sublime 
Than these late days which Father Time, 

By deed and stroke, through grime and smoke, 

Thrills with rich life? 
Could love's soft breath, 'mid Latmus' flowers. 
Touch honor's ear, like golden hours 

Of generous strife? 



AWAKENING OF ENDYMION. 203 

See, then, through new-grown faith in men, 
The wall-pent town, pest breeding den, 
Now stretching safe o'er hill and plain, 
See wider doors and richer stores 
In learning's halls. 
See charity her new mission fill. 
Giving the poor man purposed skill 
To break his thralls. 

See new-born sense enlarge our view. 
And leap to work, anent the clew 
That national culture, arts are due 
To social springs, that e'en for kings 

Wisdom ordains 
That each his personal limits find 
Near the alignments of his kind, 

Whate'er his pains ; 

That wealth, if it would speed its way 
In palace car and steamer gay. 
Must wait till these inventions pay, 
From common need of swifter speed ; 

That thought divine. 
To give to life a generous spur, 
Made progress mean a forward stir 

Along the line. 

Once frenzy taught that God's decrees 
Made flesh of those and fish of these ; 
That doom stamped men, "th' elect and lees". 
But men still learn and idols burn ; 



204 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

As centuries crawl, 
Plain sense still shines in scriptures old, 
In promptings new, — like burnished gold,- 

In care for all. 

Could Marathon all heart-strings thrill, 
Or Bannock Burn, or Bunker Hill, 
Did not our kind one unction feel? 
Or Miriam's song hail, all along, 

Responsive hearts? 
Burns lure the peasant, charm his Grace? 
Rustics detect the catholic trace 

In Garrick's arts? 

Or our brave city of the lake 
With bugle-call the nations shake, 
That farthest tribes their wallets take, 
Through common zest in what is best 

For common man? 
Men love heroic fires to feel, 
In brave response to brave appeal 

To swell the van? 

'Neath this new sense of common weal. 
Self, — though to personal interests leal, — 
With insight deep and prudent zeal 
Upholds the cause of righteous laws 
Where'er they fall ; 
Meshed with the race in good or ill. 
Of every wrong it feels the thrill. 
And fears the thrall. 



AWAKENING OF ENDYMION. 205 

Manhood has ta'en the field to win ; 
God's image knows life's higher plane, 
And after centuries hopes again, 

Through that great Name whose orifiamme 

Wakes glorious strife ; 
Which brought no stagnant peace to earth, 
But conflict's joys of higher worth, 

"Abundant life". 

Wake, then, Endymion, from thy sleep. 
While apathy rules thee, angels weep. 
Youth's gallant sword hath magic sweep ; 
The foe it slays will speak its praise, 

Since manhood gains. 
And truth's sole warfare's to transmute 
To angel's bent whate'er of brute 

Within us reigns. 

Wake, know what glory 'tis to stand 
A freeman in a freeman's land ; 
Co-worker with God's privileged band 
To build a place where all the race 

May learn to live ; 
Whose each hand-stroke and stroke of pen 
Counts in the work of building men 

Strong to achieve. 

Wake, stand with that proud galaxy, 
Mightiest of earth, because most free 
To catch great truths, sweet sympathy, 
And purpose high, straight from the sky, 



206 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Where good has birth, — 
Join heart and hand with workers true, 
Who make our dear Red, White and Blue 

Hope, inspiration, pride of earth. 



RECONCILING THE WORLD TO HIMSELF. 

*' God was in Christ bringing the world into accord with Him- 
zlfy Paul's sublimest utterance.* 

Could you and I have sought to lay 
Our heads on great Jehovah's breast? 

Yet glad we hear a Shepherd say, 

^'Come, find in Me a friend and rest". 

Could we have prayed, great God forgive? 

Searching all worlds to find God's place? 
How sweet then, "Look to Me and live, 

In Mine behold the Father's face". 



Could we have made of God a Vine 
So near that we could hourly feel 

Its genial tide of life divine 

Through all our conscious being steal? 



* " One Christ, who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and 
buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only 
for original guilt, but also for the actual sins of men." Paul's 
sublimest utterance as paganized in "Articles of Religion," 
No. 2. 



RECONCILIATION. 207 

Could words of ours have cast a spell 
Like these : *'Let children come to Me, 

Of such is heaven"? Could art so well 
Picture Elysian purity? 

Or paint a ladder to the skies, 

Like childhood's heaven-born, eager greed, 
To act, to grow, to know, and rise. 

As savage sires or Christian lead? 

Could we have measured Father-love, 
Or known the priceless worth of man. 

Who to such depths all heaven could move 
To make him fit for bliss again ? 

Could you or I have e'er divined 

That loving work would make us one 

With God, His angels and our kind, 

Not faith, which cries Lord, Lord, alone? 

Could we have traced the cunning clew 

That makes earth one in wealth and power ; 

Gives all that God and men can do 
To each contributor of dower? 

Shamed the blind mole that hoards his gold 
-And hoards himself in steel-ribbed urn? 

Nor plants to reap a hundred fold 
Of earth and heaven in glad return? 



208 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Could we have swept life's tables clear 

From blind "tradition's" blundering tomes ; 

Raised woman to her equal sphere 
As culture's queen in cultured homes? 

Could we have known that sin is death, 
Christ's quickening life its antidote ; 

Poured out to change our vital breath, 
And heal — not meet a pagan thought? 

Could we alone have understood 

The spirit-birth. Love's magic roles? 

How not o'er altars drenched in blood 
God dwells, but in aspiring souls? 

Could we have pierced the frigid gloom 
Which shrouds our life in endless night. 

And thrown a sheen around the tomb 
To bring heaven's welcome joys in sight? 

Godhood in Christ, the Son of Man? 

His Father ours? Then who are we? 
"Sons"? "In His image"? Wondrous plan 

To link us with Divinity. 



WHERE SHALL WE FIND HIM? 209 



WHERE SHALL WE FIND HIM? 

Said a soi-disant infidel friend to me : " I should like to know 
how in hell you prove there is a God." 

Nay, nay, not in hell, thou wilt scarce find Him 

there, 
Though he'll plunge to all depths for thy yearning 

and prayer. 
Where aversion or prejudice find welcome home, 
Sweet thoughts which bring God to thee never will 

come. 

Proofs? Logic pretends to no plumb-line to 

reach it. 
Did the Christ e'er frame argument tending to 

teach it? 
Seek through uses and purpose a Maker divine? 
Logic snarls, "Do not attributes show a design? 
Since God's faculties savor of use, who designed 

Him"? 
Thus boxing the compass of logic few find Him. 

In silence the beauty and grandeur of night 
Bathed the spirit of David with manly delight. 
In this rapture of blessing his soul could but shout, 
"'Tis the Lord and none other who stretcheth 

them out", 
Through "Father", "Child", "Lily" and "Pure- 

ness of life", 
Christ drew men toward God — not through logical 

strife. 



210 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Melchisedec saw in lamb, heifer and dove, 
God's emblems of innocence, purity, love ; 
In the joy-breeding sun saw the symbol of Deity. 
On these planes thoughts of God are a sheer spon- 
taneity. 

God is Love. Does Love need logicians to prove 
that you feel it? 

The task, when love's present, is how to conceal it. 

The fact that we want Him, that proves Him to be. 

This proof fits our tests in life, three times in three. 

We've a longing for beauty, gay landscapes are 
here ; 

J'or the wife, child and friend, and we find them 
all near. 

Take full list of our longings the objects to meet 
them 

Are all within reach, we feel sure we shall greet 
them. 

But our sphere is the universe ; crippled and pent 

By the earth and its clouds, we are never con- 
tent. 

When life's diapason sweeps up to God's throne, 

All its tones swell in harmonies else wise unknown ; 

The mysteries of being grow clear to the view. 

And beatitudes fall, as on mountains the dew. 

Not through solving of mysteries, then, find we the 

Lord, 
But by finding life's clew in God all is accord. 



WHERE SHALL WE FIND HIM? 211 

The thought's born in thy being, like appetence in 

seed : 
As gravity in matter, an exigent need ; 
As the sense is of equity — may be men lose it, 
As fishes their eyesight, when ceasing to use it. 
Nay, may we not lose any power of the soul? 
Is it rare, even here, to see men lose the whole? 
Let the soul, then, that's dungeoned from God in 

dark night, 
Fly, open its windows, God floods it like light. 

Old sages vest eyes with "Sun sense", "helioid" ; * 
Else, in spite of the light, space would be to us 

void. 
We forget how God's image ennobled us first ; 
So we reckon as trifles soul hunger and thirst. 
Yet the boy climbs to manhood and conquers his 

fate, 
Urged by yearning pervasive, undying, innate. 



* Helioeides, like the snn, bright and beaming, of kindred na- 
ture with the sun; Plato, in "The Republic", and Plotinus, in 
" The Enneads ". So also Goethe : 

" War nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, 

Wie konnt's der Sonne Licht erblicken? 
Lebt nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft, 
Wie konnt uns Gottliches entziicken" ? 

As some further authority for attributing senses — powers of 
clutch — to the soul, see Coleridge : " Reason is fixed, and in all 
its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of 
their truth. It, the pure reason, is, indeed, nearer to sense than 
to understanding". See also the Bible: "Who by searching 
can find out God " ? Yet none but "The fool saith in his heart, 
* There is no God' ". 



212 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

True art moves by craving of soul, or 't is none. 
'Tis the heart finds the hero imprisoned in stone. 
So I 'm guessing 'tis sympathy, hunger of soul, 
Brings us God ; and the more as I study His role 
In the make-up of man ; how He planted within, 
Desires which fill earth with activity's din ; 
Make rivers and lightnings turn industry's wheel ; 
Make scalpel and lens God's deep mysteries re- 
veal ; 
Nay, turn giant condensers toward Mars and fair 

Venus, 
Through desire of enjoying born sympathies be- 
tween us. 
Thus while men vaunt that mind buifds all good 

that we know, 
Agnoting all things they can't touch with their toe, 
See mind dose away ages in barbarous estates, 
Till soul hunger compels us to widen life's gates. 

Longing beech-nuts find food which will build up a 

beech. 
Since Wisdom placed nuts and their food within 

reach. 
So I ween where there 's hunger, there 's pabulum 

that feeds it. 
Since the hunger is there but because "Wisdom 

breeds it. 

No cold purpose of reason e'er vanquished a foe, 
Like the patriot's love in a patriot's blow. 



WHERE SHALL WE FIND HIM? 213 

Nay, we cling to all good, to our altars and fires ; 
To wife, children and friends, to the graves of our 

sires ; 
Life's suavities, the neighbor, the whole social 

role ; 
"We know them, indeed, but through hunger of 

soul. 
Is it strange, then, that God should His wisdom 

approve 
By hiding his face from all senses but love? 

Do we need Him to teach us that four fourths are 

one. 
Or the tale of the earth plainly written in stone ? 
Yet 'tis meet He declare "My beloved shall sleep" ; 
That "If men turn from evil their souls they shall 

keep". 
That "bloody oblations he can not endure. 
But will pardon the penitent and pity the poor". 
Nay, enter life's highways, for there is God's throne ; 
In interests supernal Jehovah is known. 

Let your logic go laugh, then, your learning go 

leer ; 
The soul hath her senses heaven's voices to hear. 
Give the mind powers to grasp all the splendors of 

earth, 
To revel as king in the land of her birth. 
And deny the soul senses with which she may clutch 
The twelve fruits on life's trees which your logic 

can 't touch? 



214 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Has logic taught babes untrod ways to their food, 
Or love for their first-born in mothers to brood? 
Or from God to His child do such leagues intervene 
That love's appetites can 't travel the spaces be- 
tween? 
Nay, our God He is near, and our souls they are 

great ; 
As a dam for her nursling for us He will wait. 

To Beauty, Good, Love, Truth, Infinity, God, 

The soul was attuned in her primal abode. 

What's God's image but senses for these, every one? 

Yea, she knows them, spite logic, as eyes know the 
sun. 

The Messiah, the Annointed, we speak but His 
name, 

Touch the hem of His robe, and our hearts are 
aflame 

With a sense of His presence ; His sympathy, heal- 
ing ; 

Sense of kinship and longing to hold Him indwell- 
ing. 



A PRIMER OF HISTORY. 
a. THE CHRISTLY EDEN. 

There came a day w^ien heaven seemed near ; 

The vision opened cheerily 
Of "Peace on Earth" 'twas sweet to hear. 

Carolled by angels merrily. 



A PRIMER OF HISTORY. 215 

"Good-will, Good-will", the anthem ran j 

The theme, the soul's divinity. 
"A son earth-born shall prove that man 

Still holds to heaven propinquity." 

Urim and Thumim shrink away ; 

No symbols point afar to bliss ; 
Since "Truth" comes down in very clay, 

And "Light" and "Life" and blessedness. 

Red altars fall, the pagan lie. 

Which salved the consciences of men. 

By loving work and purity 

Men seek "Eternal Life to attain". 

With altars fall the priestly train ; 

Each man feels freedom like a son. 
Their temple is God's sky and plain ; 

Its ritual, "Lord, Thy will be done." 

Its gates ajar seven days in seven, 

All human interests comprise ; 
"Subdue, have empire", 'bests of heaven, 

Awaken arts and high emprise. 

But most, men seek to gladden earth 
By wholesome life and healing word ; 

Their hoc in signo, "The New Birth". 
Their argument, their "Risen Lord." 



216 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

By Christ's commands and reason led, 

Their "children come, heirs, types of heaven"- 

Young feet are trained, young souls are fed, 
Ere starved on wind or passion driven. 

They dare not trust to cataclysms 

To cleanse once poisoned atmospheres ; 

They little value paroxysms 

For building fruitful characters. 

Their inspiration, bond and guide 

The golden truths of Olivet ; 
They seek no subtile, vague aside, 

With learned restraints on God beset. 

They pray for pardon, feel its power ; 

Love God, home, land, as Jesus did ; 
Play good Samaritan, fill each hour 

With friendly cheer or tasks at need. 

While on the plane of law with John 
They bow to forms which symbolize ; 

When Holy Ghost and Fire come down 
These "Living Witnesses" suffice. 

When Nerbes light fierce fires and rave. 

Their answer confident and clear, 
"Himself, well-spring of life He gave, 

The end of sin, of death, of fear. 



A PRIMER OF HISTORY. 217 

''He 'lifted up' and 'glorified', 

Draws like a whirlwind all who will. 

One prayer we raise, 'In Him to bide', 
And work for men with Christly zeal. 

"Earth as a shadow, bideth not ; 

Its tortures glance life's verities, 
The Healer comes, all pain's forgot ; 

Charmed by His wholesome sympathies". 

b. REIGN OF SACERDOTALISM. 

Learned falsehood, artful in her schemes, 
Knows how to please and to deceive ; 

Makes creeds of Paul's ad hominems ; 

For generous work, cries, "Just believe". 

For love enthrones philosophy. 

With rhetoric's silken net-work rife. 
Jew forms of pagan expiacy, — 

By Jews laid by, — soothe errant life. 

Rome, Egypt come, with pomps and feasts, 
Which long have played the enslaving role ; 

No "Living Word", but gilded Christs, 
To lure the sense and cheat the soul. 

With these come, — blasphemy supreme, — 
Orders, of God's own powers compact ; 

Stamped, "Rights secured to run this scheme" ; 
An ancient rapine, still intact. 



218 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Thus man was bargained, like his Lord, 

To lust of power, to craft and pride. 
Not pen of adamant can record 

The cold, dark crimes "Faith's" temples hide ; 

Nor trace "Heform's'^ slow tortuous ways, 
Through Luther, scorning Reason's sway ; 

Whose "Faith Alone" still floats the maze 
Of whims absurd which marked his day. 

Belief that sin's congenital 

Councils still hold of more account 
Than lifting up the weak who fall, 

Or teaching youth heaven's rungs to mount ; 

Or making juster, cheaper laws 

To help the poor and check the strong, 

Break passion's tiger teeth and claws, 
Banish as well as punish wrong. 

To meet a "broken law's demands", 

Which neither blood nor sweat cements. 

More urges than to make amends 
For frauds or injured innocence. 

Waiting "God's purposed time" to come, 
' 'Depraved in toto " , ' 'wholly blind ' ' , 

Through "Sloughs Despond" men, children roam 
Some "Miracle of Grace" to find. 



A PRIMER OF HISTORY. 219 

Alas, the miracle comes too slow ; 

Gusts, cyclones can not reach us all. 
By other wiles we're held in tow ; 

Once snared in sin, we love its thrall. 

C. THE MACEDONIAN CRY. 

Meanwhile God's truth 's aflood like light ; 

Fierce to illume each dark estate. 
Though perk "authority" brave our right 

We knock, Love opens wide the gate. 

Christ's simple life's the guide we crave. 

The "Living Word" can bring men might. 
These live to draw toward heaven, to save ; 

Dogmas but cloud, not quench their light. 

Then tell why manhood still must wait 
Schemes to build countless steeples tall 

For eternizing old debate 

On forms of lave or Adam's fall? 

Nay, for such whims we 're born too late ; 

This age is apt for something more ; 
Man, country, culture can not wait ; 

'T 's crime to waste a needed store. 

Churches may thrive through pride's behest, 
While manhood fares toward ray less night. 

Besotted Italys in the West 

Were frigid cheer to patriot's sight. 



220 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

With freedom laws but advertise 

Men's average sense of right and wrong. 

Before a nation's life can rise, 

Trained thought must lift the ruling throng. 

Christ's truth can 't save the world alone? 

The churchless horde hold worthier thought. 
That truth changed Paul, and all must own 

Proved sword and buckler where he fought. 

Augustine, Calvin make a guess 
On distant heaven's deep designs ; 

They just make guesses one guess less ; 
Scores have struck just as fertile lines. 

Is aught in history which presages 
All earth in one of these shall join? 

Do all surpass the "Pock of Ages" 
To build a helpful manhood on? 

Dark ages, could they rear us guides 

More w^ise than Christian centuries can? 

If so, turn back time's moving tides ; 
Plunge us in stagnant night again. 

Men now know work means moving force, 

Not energy in grand repose. 
Manhood has scheduled her resource ; 

The time is up, this strike will close. 



THE HELPMEET. 221 

Or these will move or those will come ; 

They 're moving and they 're coming now, 
Who '11 make Christ's simple truths their home ; 

His work their life, as He showed how. 



WOMAN IN CIVILIZED SOCIETY. 

On hearing recently an old-time Semitic sermon, riveting the 
chains of scripture on " woman, subjected by the fall ". 

When the All-wise Creator has fashioned a pair 

In some apt co-relation of uses to share ; 
Like a bow and a string, 

That an arrow may hie ; 
Like a right and left wing, 
That an eagle may fly ; 

Like man and wife 

To keep full the swift current of sublunar life ; 

Share joy by the cradle or grief by the tomb ; 

Build men, through the magical power of a home ; 

Sweet home, source and fortress of bliss here be- 
low ; 

Safe port, when the blackest of tempets may blow ; 

Where we scale in life's May-day the beckoning 
skies. 

Or muse on its memories with film-covered eyes : 

School of force and of grace, to provide and dis- 
pose, 

Till each cottage with radiant richness o'erflows, — 

Spreading generous culture on every side, 

The city's adornment, Columbia's pride ; 



222 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Tell me, oh pert philosopher, 

Which is the subject element here, 

The sturdy bow or urgent string ; 

The sinister or dexter wing ; 

The — can I say of love's sweet sphere 

That half or this? Please make it clear 

Just how can God's great plans move on, 

If bow and string, if wing and wing, 

If soul and soul be not as one ; 

As Christ, sweet willed as w^ell as wise, 

Taught, frowning down Semitic lies 

And sharply chiding "your traditions". 
The sensual "hardness of your hearts" ; 
The specious Pharisaic arts 

Which heaped the law with vile conditions. 
Till woman sank in such degree 
That centuries barely set her free. 
Christ tore these cobwebs from the law, 
Behind tradition plainly saw 
Creation's fiat fix a plan 
To guide the first, the latest man. 
He used no taunting epithets. 
Nor setit her down to hell's black gates. 
Because tradition's woman fell. 
And this is Christ, regard it well. 
(When will the modern Pauline pastor 
Interpret Paul by Paul's great Master?) 
True, cruel paths has woman trod, 
But upward still, her helper God, 
From Tartar tent and slavery. 
Through proud, chivalric bravery, 



AS ITHERS SEE US. 223 



Through higher-souled urbanity, 
To freedom's height, Christianity. 
Vulcan and Venus, use and grace, 
With kindred interest in the race, 
Unite with Christ's their classic fire, 
Columbia's high-born sons to inspire ; 
Woman has won her long-fought field, 
Her honored place she '11 never yield. 



AS ITHERS SEE US. 

" O wad some power the giftie gie us 
To see oursel's as ithers see us ". — Bukns. 

Could hell, through schemes of wit or strife, 

Achieve a neater job 
To shell the golden grains from life. 

And leave the world a cob 

Than smooth device to trade in prayer, 

In Christ and truth as well ; 
Hold what is free as God's free air, 

As merchandise to sell? 

Two millions, yearly, turn to one, 

More millions to his staff; 
While longing souls are played upon 

To trade their wheat for chaff? 



224 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

While Rome, the seat of costly show, 

In the meek Jesus' name, 
Unmatched in ignorance, vice and woe, 

Puts Christian claims to shame? 

While Spain, the fondest on the roll, 

More blind and palsied, yearly ; 
Tricked by a Dago's crafty soul, 

Pays for her ruin dearly? 

While France, more ardent, played the game 

To finish, long years past. 
And now but names the priestly name 

To point her flambergast? 

While England proudly takes Rome's clues 
With pontiff queens and Georges, 

T' absorb, with prelates, revenues 
Which starve the looms and forges? 

Crush men, as mills crush gold-fiecked quartz. 

To glut a pampered legion ; 
Till God is crushed from manly hearts ; 

In name of God's religion? 

Crush till French maelstroms, palled in night. 
Whelm thrones in black perdition ; 

"Lest men forget" God stands for right. 
Lest right forget her mission? 



SUPPOSE. 225 

While pulpit, rostrum, press and all 

The Christianizing (?) train. 
Through fear or sympathy gloss the thrall 

Which holds the souls of men? 

While statesmen wink their eyes and mell 

Their issues with each fox 
Who brings, as votes or clientelle, 

Ignorant, obedient flocks. 

0, simple truth, so free, so good, 

To make men good and free. 
When, thinking, will the multitude 

Follow no guide but thee? 



SUPPOSE. 



Suppose we find within this book 
What piques our point of view. 

Give other fountains sweeter drafts 
For either me or you? 

Suppose King David sinned and Hume, 
That Peter sinned and Jacques ; 

Does that affect God's truth p^r se, 
Or reason loose or lock? 



226 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Suppose old Moses wrote some guess 

The ages guessed before ; 
Does that annul "Thy sin 's forgiven, 

Go forth and sin no more"? 

That Samuel wrote the Pentateuch, 
Which Jews ascribe to Moses ; 

Does that affect one incident 

That shows what Love proposes? 

If in plain tales of human life 
God's loving thoughts are found, 

And welcome rungs to scale the skies, 
Does this thy reason wound? 

Pearls sleep in silt, diamonds in gangue. 

And cost thy toil and skill. 
Were these more precious being gained 

Without thy work or will? 

Suppose hard schoolmen conjured up 
Hard creeds from scripture pages, 

Need we be fettered by their whims 
In these enlightened ages? 

And why, O man of zeal, should gangue 
Or tales thine interest move? 

Diamonds will shine and pearls be fair. 
And God's thoughts glow with love. 



CHARACTEK BUILDERS. 227 

Semitic trends toward pagan rites, 

Lust, avarice, vengeful pride, 
Made up the sensuous, warring creeds, 

Christ's life-work brushed aside. 

And, now, suppose some Bashan Bull 

Should call this liberalism. 
And roar and toss the dust about 

And quote his catechism? 



CHARACTER BUILDERS. 

I know a lass ; she was a lass ; 

She's older now. 
She brings a world of heaven to pass ; 

I scarce know how. 

Earnest, yet cheerful ; jolly, even, 

Her life is teaching. 
More boys and girls she speeds toward heaven 

Than worlds of preaching. 

She makes no sign, no loud profession 

Of mazy creed. 
The saints, though, make a long procession, 

Who own her lead. 



228 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

She stands for right, in plan and figure ; 

In point and spelling ; 
But stirs hearts more that manly vigor 

Become indwelling. 

Anxious for souls as Paul or Peter, 

She doesn't know it. 
But when her work stands forth to meet her, 

The fruits will show it. 

She has her way, — others as well — 

Follows her heart. 
Not seeking heaven nor shunning hell, 

She does her part. 



A true and living model ; long the roll 

Of kindred, generous mood; 
Warding depravity from the human soul 

By planting active good. 

Theirs the yet plastic, warm material ; 

(Not spirit cast and chill ; ) 
Which crowns their zeal with lives imperial. 

Furnished to work God's will. 

Co-partnership supreme with Love Divine, 

Earth has no higher sphere. 
Theirs not to promise distant Sonnenschein ; 

Theirs to build heaven here. 



JUST TURNED ELEVEN. 229 

Dear Flag, what fruitfuler work was ever thine 

Than cheering, helping these? 
How soon humanely glorious didst thou shine, 

New mistress of the seas? 



JUST TURNED ELEVEN. 

Perhaps your eyes are not like mine, 

At three score years and seven, 
To see what depths of richness shine 

In eyes just turned eleven. 

To me there 's naught that 's named on earth 
That smacks so much of heaven 

As eyes, or sad or brimmed with mirth, 
Of boy just turned eleven. 

Our sample 's awkward at the board, 

Like most boys tall and lanky ; 
But no lithe squire or proud young lord 

Could show more grace on "Spanky". 

He 's rough with dogs ; and — mother cat — 

E'en yet he likes to tease her ; 
But you 'd enjoy his manly chat 

While reading "Julius Caesar". 



230 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

His gun — (It is a marvelous thing, 
All boys so love the tragic) — 

Quails, doves and rice birds on the wing, 
Come down to that like magic. 

When he accosts a stubborn cow, 
You 'd be disposed to pity her ; 

But mark his gentle accents now, 

While reading gems from '^Whittier". 

His thundering tread and boisterous words 
Sometimes suggest a bummer ; 

But list his "horse-hair" woo the cords 
In "The Last Rose of Summer". 

To school? Well, souls are rare, indeed. 
Like Ascham's, long since sainted, 

Born the rich potencies to read 
On youth's clean tablets painted. 

And so, for fear of shallow maid, 
From Dixie's land or Yankee, 

We 've called, till now, no other aid 
But music's queen and "Spanky". 

Some hours apart with Colburn's train. 
With Harkness, Prescott, Guyot ; 

And some to trace each planet's gain 
Through Gemini, Cancer, Leo ; 



JUST TURNED ELEVEN. 231 

To scan the bones of *'Jyp", who died, 
And note the corn seed swelling ; — 

We '11 risk his chance on these beside 
''False syntax" and apt spelling. 

Each implement upon the farm, 

From sulky-plow to reaper, 
He knows each bearing like a charm, 

And just the way to keep her. 

He drives the mules to drag and mow, 
Makes black folk proud to serve him ; 

Thus learns how forces ebb and flow. 
Gains confidence to nerve him. 

Sure that from mastery culture grows. 

We take these twain together, 
And step by step as learning goes. 

Her feet to use we '11 tether. 

Mayhap your eyes are not like mine, 

At three score years and seven, 
To see each human interest shine 

In eyes just turned eleven. 

Yet naught, howe'er embalmed, of earth. 

Can smack to me of heaven, 
Like eyes, or sad or brimmed with mirth. 

Of boy just turned eleven. 



232 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 



FOILS FOR ADVERSITY. 

[A pastoral.] 

When comrades sworn, with oily tongues, 

Seem false and hard to me, 
I give the winds their treacherous wrongs 

And turn, dear nurse, to thee. 

Indus, Indusia, Dusianne, 

Nor Butterfly nor Chrys, 
Nor Belle, the mule, nor Tobe, nor Jean, 

Will play me false, I wis. 

They and the less familiar herd 

Can never see me come. 
But, with some joy of kinship stirred, 

They make me feel at home. 

Two fishes, watched with dumb surprise, 
Pile stones, a marvelous heap ; 

Anon, a thousand fins and eyes. 
New life within the deep. 

I stay to see their spring of joy. 

Their bliss in kin and clan. 
They dread no treacherous decoy ; 

Through me they fear not man. 



FOILS FOR ADVERSITY. 233 

I whistle to a mocking-bird 

Which haunts my favorite tree ; 
No sooner is my Dixie heard 

Than it comes back to me. 

I turn aside from business jaunts 
To nurse these new-found treasures, 

Rejoiced that all life has its chance 
At life's abounding pleasures. 

I feel anew how Nature wove 

Sweet lures of sympathy through all ; 

And dream how life was erst but love. 
Tissued in sense, a mutual thrall. 

How being joys in correlation : 

Cold steel, e'en, seeks its cynosure ; 

Thence upward through the whole creation, 
Seductive witcheries allure. 

And good is larger than our race, 

Wisdom more boundless than our ken ; 

For sympathy, harmony and grace 

Wait through all worlds to comfort men. 

These make that larger sphere of life 
Which sings with all the spheres that be 

The rest is overtone, the strife 
Which marks our personality. 



234 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Art shocked that graj-haired sages ween 
That heaven is a great sea of rest, 

Where souls shall feel what is has been, 
In sympathy with all that 's best. 

* 'Heaven bodes of action"? Yes, to youth. 

Action has pains as well as zest. 
Quiet? — and feel good, beauty, truth? 

Is aught diviner saints have guessed? 

What do our souls in time, but feelf 

Rose, song, ride appetite, not air. 
We clutch our friends through love and leal. 

When organs fail do souls forbear? 

Ask Sappho and old Homer whether 

Their senses or their spirits ken. 
We never found the peopled ether 

Till led by sightless Milton's pen. 

When intervening veils are drawn, 

Are we not nearer to our joys? 
Through sense we stray like crafts at dawn ; 

We grope and fall like blindfold boys. 

How life is all interrogation. 

Discussed in pastures and at pools ; 

Leading to sweetest contemplation ; — 

And through sweet dreams to rest from — fools, 



CHIVALRIE. 235 



CHIVALRIE. 

[A definition.] 

Two friendly men had seen a mnle , 
One says 'twas gray, the other white. 

In hot dispute they quote a rule 

Must settle matters, they must fight. 

Their honor dictates this shall be, 

And this, they say, is "Chivalry". 

They 've sons to educate, have wives ; 

All have been friends, have interwed ; 
They doom to drudgery these lives ; — 

The Roan 's nor gray nor white, — they 're dead ; 
And neither one is here to see. 
And this, they say, is "Chivalry'*. 

Christ burst tradition's Jewish prison, 

On woman placed the gospel crown. 
She meekly lisps, "The Christ, He 's risen"? 

Some learned doctors "turn her down", 
With scraps of old Jews' history. 
"God's work 's for men. Vive chivalrie" ! 

Called t' inspire the budding thought, 

She seeks, — her glorious work to crown, — 

Share of the light the years have brought. 
Glib politician's "turn her down" : 

"A pendent dewdrop she must be" : 

Schools are for statesmen; — "Chivalrie" ! 



236 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

I 've dwelt the *' noble red man" nigh ; 

He speeds a bullet through the ring ; 
Unflinching fights ; holds honor high ; 

Scorns work ; rides proud as any king ; 
Treats women as old Jews did ; see? 
Six points in seven toward "Chivalrie". 

I dreamed a Christ had come to earth 
To burst of flesh and death the prison ; 

That mind and spirit waited birth, 

Those subject and their conqueror risen. 

I wake ; brute force still shouts in glee : 

"Vive le cheval ; vive Chivalrie" ! 



THE STRANGE HOST. 

[A veteran's dream.] 

" Ich bin miide. Lassen wir Heim gehen ". 

— Last words of Neander. 

Cast forth from the arms of that Sphynx, the sea, 

I was gret by a soft tongued host : 
Weird questions come in with the waves to me, 

As we share with the night-wind the coast. 

Conceits which have wakened my hopes or fears 

Seem worlds as he leads the theme ; 
Each hour seems fraught with the burden of years : 

Apt link in the eternal scheme. 



THE STRANGE HOST. 237 

Now, scanning my life-work from day to day, 

We find not a threadlet is gone ; 
Each scene and each vision come all the way, 

In texture and coloring on. 

Each resolute purpose, each helpful deed 
Shows here, in the web, bright gold ; 

Nay, it hides, as our loving God decreed, 
Of sin some distortion or mold. 

Now, silent sailing ; — a mystic shore 

Seems brought, by mirage, more nigh. — 

Its rivers and groves and its fruits galore 
Give joy to my peering eye. 

Its skies send me back to a Lenox hill, 

In rear of a home-bound herd, 
An age has departed, but not the thrill 

Those pictures of beauty stirred. 

Sheer out from Oneida's etherial blue 

Broad arches of gold stretch afar ; 
A flaxen haired boy sees bright visions through 

Huge crystalline gates ajar. 

Now, skies grow russet and crimson and blue, 

And the shore draws steadily on ; 
Till the voices we hear and the forms we view 

Seem of those we have always known. 



238 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

But aha ! At the speed of our gliding craft 

Amazement is choking my breath. 
And the breezes seem laden with sleep, — as they 
waft ; — 

Can it be — my strange host — is — death? 

But, then, since I find him so knightly true, 

My soul feels nor fear nor surprise ; 
While gently, as angels are storied to do, 

Soft fingers have closed mine eyes. 

Yet I plead for the boy, who will have no guide. 
And for cares which will wait my hand ; 

For the wdfe w^ho has grown to my longing side ; — 
But — we Ve joined — with the — ransomed band. 

*'The gift of our God is eternal life" ; 

Soft, — mingling, — each welcoming strain : — 
**An end of all pain and an end of strife" ; 

*' Sweet Home, where we meet again". 

I wake, but dear faces grown large and fair, 

And clear as a shower-washed sky, 
Still beck me their glorified life to share. 

0, soul, were it grief to die? 



THE GOLDEN AGE. 239 



THE GOLDEN AGE. 
[On reading General Pike's lines: " Life is a Count of Losses".] 

So, thou wouldst make me old, 

This fair, young year, 
With lies vain men have told, 

Through tears and fear : 
*'That purpling days less beauty show, 
That zephyrs less serenely blow 
Than when we felt them years ago, 

In ecstasy of love, 
With friends whose friendship 's still aglow 

Around us and above ; 
That morning shines less fresh and gay, 
That summer blasts the hopes of May, 
That autumn's gold grows dim and gray, 

As years roll on". 
False all. These charm no less to-day 

Than years agone. 

How can I count me old 

With blink and leer? 
Are all earth's hearthstones cold? 

Hollow their cheer? 
Is love a sprite in haste to fly? 
Does thought promote inanity? 
Do good deeds breed but vanity? 

Has truth no worth? 
Does "brute" define humanity. 

O'er all the earth? 



240 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Is it a myth God's love for me 

Hath opened fountains large and free, 

Of life-renewing potency? 

Nay, in firm faith 
My raptured eyes refuse to see 

Deceit or death. 

Three score fifteen. Is 't old, 

Tempered with cheer, 
While pleasures fresh unfold 

From year to year? 
Or wherefore wait for joys to come. 
Since joys divine find earthly home? 
How can I count their growing sum 

And fear decay. 
While brighter grows, mid threatening gloom, 

Love's cheering ray? 
Fruits sweeten with the southing sun. 
Do human souls, their race well run. 
Reverse wise nature's laws? Not one. 

Hail, Bismarck ! Ho, 
Holmes, Gladstone, Whittier, Tennyson. 

All answer, no. 

Let 's laugh, then, counted old : 

Laugh like true seers. 
Who see nor rust nor mold 

In ripening years. 
Life's harvest days but just begin ; 
Her richest sheaves we then but glean, 
For generous use of kith and kin, 



SPRING AND THE CRITICS. 241 

When brighter gleams 

From gates ajar the beckoning sheen 
Of richer and diviner themes. 

How do we feel youth's trends renewed 

But that creative forces brood, 

And stir again to growing mood 
Our o'er-ripe grains? 

Sweet pledge of life's free amplitude 
On higher planes ; 
As autumn greens the furrowed glebe for coming 

spring, 
That coming scythes may laugh, and coming reap- 
ers sing? 



SPRING AND THE CRITICS. 

Let the great write of great things — great rogues 

and great sleeves ; 
What great sphinx of the weather and state-craft 
believes. 
I 've been waiting a month for the sweet smiles 

of spring , 
Lo, I feel her beguilements, of her I will sing, 
Indifferent alike to rebuffs and to praises : 
I 'm a lover to-day, I am daft on the daisies. 

"Turned of seventy, I"? Great Zeus, don't you 

see 
Spring is seventy-five thousand times older than 

me? 



242 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Yet she shows how to cast all these eons aside, 

And stands forth in beauty like yesterday's 
bride ; 
Lures the gnomes underground from the Frost- 
Queen's embraces. 
Her retinue? Ha, ha! Is Love old? Are the 
Graces? 

Nay, on high planes of being decay 's a mis- 
nomer ; 

Spring 's as winsome to-day as when charming 
old Homer ; 
Or skimming the land, fair Camilla in hand ; 

Or weaving the bulrushes round little Moses ; 

Or w^reathing Eve's bower with May-flowers 
and roses. 

Must I cut her acquaintance, dear critic, because 
You 're struck with the notion you made Nature's 
laws? 
Tell that yarn to the glow-worm, forbid her to 

glow, 
Since her sparkle was just as well done, we all 
know. 
Many thousands of stratified ages ago. 
Talk of triteness to larks and forbid them to rise 
On notes born of newly found joy to the skies. 
Bid the linnets be glum and the mocking birds 
dumb. 
Tell the lambs that their pranks are old style on the 
lea; 



SPRING AND THE CRITICS. 243 

But think you try soporate logic on me, 

Wlien gay Spring sets her foot 'gainst the stone 

at the tomb 
Which has prisoned our hopes in Cimmerian 
gloom, 
Sets the rhapsodies free and opens to view 
Her "Star Act, Creation", with ecstacies new? 
Is a yearly rehearsal too much for the story 
Of Life's pulsing progress from glory to glory? 

Spring brings the sweet clover, spreads bloom the 

fields over ; 
Stirs the hills to their core, friendly, beautiful hills, 
Gushing sympathy forth, and sweet life with their 

rills ; 
Swells to gladness of power the mill-driving 

river ; 
Pumps life to the tree-tops ; sets lawns all a-quiver 
With leaflet and floret, with plumage and 

youth ; 
With motion and song, pledging mutual truth 
To some witching ideal of joys that shall be. 
The gift of fond hopes from spiced isles of the sea ; 
To worlds of things chattered of, — Hark ye, — 

Explore, 
Lo, the madrigal mysteries, — one, two, three^ 

four ; 
And the rapture redoubled a thousand times 
o 'er. 



244 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

I '11 chant how spring brings to dam, kid, colt and 

calf, 
From our sweet mother Nature, life, love and a 
laugh ; 
Swells the corn in the furrow to meet the desire 
Of the fathers who pray and the sons who aspire. 

Does jour heart feel the bliss of these gratified mil- 
lions 

Now charming our senses with buoyant cotillions ; 
Waking cadence of song and cadence of motion 
In homes and in hamlets from ocean to ocean? 

Spring's a help-meet for Diety, busy as He ; 
She curtains the landscape, she carpets the lea ; 

Makes luscious the strawberry, flavors the 

peach ; 
All high arts of creation she 's yearning to 
teach. 
A model of work, of refinement, of charity ; 
Columbia's daughters will feel no disparity. 

While busy with muffin, with garland and lay. 
Bringing homes, bringing hovels, the sunshine, 
the May. 



AUTUMN. 245 



AUTUMN. 

[November. A Fragment.] 

See, circling round us, what bouquets 

Of beauty these Autumnal days : 

Those glossy oaks red, brown and green, 
Through mellower yellow poplars seen : 

Ye sylph-like Gums, each leaf a star 

Of varied hue, tell why from far 

Men bring soft names of grove and fell 
For nooks where our sweet memories dwell. 

Are there no oracles, muses, graces, 

In fair Columbia's sacred places? 

Are murmuring brooks here less persuasive? 
Are sylvan witcheries less pervasive ? 

By shades of myriads brave and fair, 

Who 've trod these walds and vales, I swear 

No land on earth has charms more rare. 
Sweet Sarah Hale and Genesee, — 
These names bring more of heaven to me 
That "Helen" or "Spiced Araby". 

Our broad-armed plane-trees shelter sages 

Shall distance Plato down the ages. 

Yon knoll begirt with wreaths of pine. 
Through which empurpled maples shine ; — 

Can pictures bought beyond the sea 

Yield equal joy to thee or me? 
Behind those nearer cedar heights, 
Is that a camp of red-plumed knights, 



246 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Orange and crimson banners flying, 
Or sumacs with bright hawthorns vieing? 
Thus in each dying year's unmatched horizon, 
Blend glories all the gods lay raptured eyes on. 

This annual garlanding of death 
Brings me rich heritage. It saith, 

"Life hath its seasons and its ways. 

Its autumn comes, it but obeys 
No stroke of Thor, no frost ; a nod, — 
The soul of power, the will of God". 

That will alone makes forests span 

A winter's night. Why not a man? 



AN EPIC OF THE PERIOD— THE CIVIL WAR, 
As part of the great millenium-breeding movements of tbe times. 

When Homer, of Chios, gave strength to Greek 

thews. 
By discoursing of gods who were helpers with 

men. 
He guessed not of days when Jehovah would use 
Those stout arms to beat back the barbarian's 

train ; 
Those Greeks, when they fought, knew not God's 

studied plan 
To preserve the Greek culture for Europe and man. 



THE CIVIL WAR AN EPIC OF THE PERIOD. 247 

The golden-voiced bugles of progress were ringing, 

And the land of our love was alert to obey ; 
But round one fair section a vampire was clinging, 
Who, for work she was born to, must wall out 
the day ; 
Must fetter emprise and the commerce of thought, 
The one price at which progress and culture are 
bought. 

Some power, to make end of this bird of the night, 
Made her mad with wild frenzy to stretch her 

domains. 
The "Lone-star" she'd played for, but served to 

excite 
Her fierce greed to encompass our fair Western 

plains. 
She scoffed at the thought that, in grime and in 

smoke, 
Jealous Freedom had tempered with brains brawn 

of oak. 

Yet freemen made answer, "It never can be 

That an influence fraught with such blighting 
portent, 
Shall poison the air of arenas once free". 

Bursting shells made reply. Our dear heirloom 
was rent, 
Men flew to destroy, but men flew to preserve ; 
The fierce purpose which urged them quite doub- 
ling their nerve. 



248 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Each home sent a hero, incited by — truth ; 

Or by what was truth's semblance in good peo- 
ple's thought. 

'Tis strange, as we note it, these "Tablets of 
Youth", 
How by lines once engraved there, such wonders 
are wrought. 

Gamaliel or Christ shapes a Saul or a Paul ; 

Proud Calhoun or proud Webster had fashioned 
us all. 

All "Yanghkees" * (see Cooper), 'twas fought 

inch by inch ; 
Southern pride held its edge and invoked the 

last ditch. 
In issues so large, too, no Northman could flinch. 
Though three-fourths of these latter were home 

and got rich. 
Built cities and schools on the price of supplies. 
They 're a study in catching the tides when tides 

rise. 

But, grand over all rose the purpose we see. 

"Valley Forge and Mount Vernon one banner 
shall fly ; 
Our Jeff'erson's tomb and the West he made free ; 
Warren, Sumter, Gates, Stark, as compatriots 
shall lie, 



* The Indian's effort to pronounce the French word Anglais, 
English. 



THE CIVIL WAR AN EPIC OF THE PERIOD. 249 

With Marion and Putnam, Greene, Marshall and 

With 'Old Hickory' and Webster, with Crawford 
and Clay". 

To these this was country, and altar, and home ; 
Like charmed Palestine's vales to the Lover of 

men. 
Their toils raised its pillars, made beauteous its 

dome. 
Sowed the seeds of rich culture on hillside and 

plain. 
To manly adventure and hope 't was a haven ; 
No proud heir of this afl3.uence could dare be a 

craven. 



By the way, while I think, are there men who still 

hear 
That notable order ring out loud and clear, 

From McClelland 's headquarters at bloody Antie- 
tam? 

If so, I shall be three times happy to meet ' em. 
You can hear it to-day. 
As if still in the fray? 
"Burnside, carry that bridge, 
Gain the opposite ridge. 

Then move on to the open field"? 

Well, was 't your line that wheeled? 



250 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Or did 3'oii charge the "Ledge by the Church" on 

that day? 
Or stand facing Hill's guns by "The Sunken High- 
way"? 
Or, at "Old Muma's Spring-House", climb o'er 

heaps of slain, 
In that narrower highway still clept "Bloody 
Lane"? 
O, you 're lucky, my friend, and should thank the 

good Lord, 
You "crossed over with Kodney, below, at the 
ford"? 
Then you certainly there 
Saw the canister tear 
Those brave "Nutmegs" in blue, 
Marching steady and true 

Towards the Boonsboro bridge. 
Towards the crags on the ridge? 
(The brigade was Ferero's, 
Each soldier ten hero's ;) 

Saw from bush, bank, and wall, 
Thick as rain in a squall, 
The shrapnell and rifle balls leap, saw them hit, 
As if thrown by mad fiends from the sulphurous 
pit; 
Saw, from quarry and gorge, 
As from Vulcan's hot forge, 
Bolts of death, 
At each breath. 

Rend these brave men assunder : 
Saw, still, with wild wonder. 



THE CIVIL WAR AN EPIC OF THE PERIOD. 251 

Those muscles of iron, tliose nerves of tried steel, 
Rush on with hot courage ; (you ne'er saw them 
reel ;) 
Saw them pitch down from parapets into the 

water ; 
Heard them yell all the clearer, the greater the 

slaughter ; 
Saw them crowd 'cross the bridge, 
While its arches w^ere falling ; 

Saw them rush towards the ridge, 
With a purpose appalling ; 

Saw them climb, saw them creep. 
Up that death-dealing steep ; ^ 
Saw their muskets to blaze and their bayonets to 

gleam ; 
Saw the Johnies, bewildered by what seemed a 
dream, 
Rushing wildly about 
In white panic and rout ; 
Saw the "Bay-States" and "Nutmegs" move on 

towards the field ; 
Saw in rush and repulses the same spirit revealed ; 
See, now, how the light from swift bayonets and 

sabers 
Won respect for the manhood of patriots and 
neighbors. 

"That day might have" ? Well, 
That is not mine to tell. 
God's great purpose seemed steady ; 
The great end seemed not ready. 



252 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

We may pray, though, that happier fate may 

befall us, 
That when dallying 's to do, He will please not to 

call us. 

We men had our storms, but to mother and wife 
There were constant anxiety, labor and care. 

Through men God gave victory ; through her com- 
fort, life, 
And of royal rewards she is reaping her share. 

She gained for her life-work such clever control. 

That the plaything emerged a co-ordinate soul. 

How slowly, like felines, our race gains its sight ; 
Through vain star-lore ; through mole-hills which 
rabbis called law, 
Uprooting sweet sympathies, soul of true might, 
Till their tribes were dispersed as is wind-driven 
straw ; 
Through chivalry's "Dewdrops", so vain as to 

scorn 
All life's masterful uses, whence culture is born. 

Through dogmas which rise and like mists pass 
away. 
While the Christ with one sentiment pillars the 
earth, 
And the spikenard of Mary stays sweet till to-day. 
But see life's dual forces, estranged from their 
birth, 



THE CIVIL WAR AN EPIC OF THE TERTOD. 253 

In privilege of culture and freedom now one, 
Score amazing results since the war's work is done, 

The war gave us men who redeem human worth. 

Open vistas unguessed toward large issues of life ; 

Who teach how hot purpose gives potencies birth, 

And how masterful virtues outrise vaunting 

strife ; 

What strength is in country ; how comradeship 

cheers ; 
What godhood 's in lenience ; what manhood in 
tears. 

War's umpirage casting obtrusions away, 

Struck all sway upon simple prerogative leaning ; 
Gave glint of a dawn which seems ushering the 
day 
When in interdependence life finds life's true 
meaning ; 
Endowment and work manhood's forces to leaven, 
Giving givers, heaven's miracle, tenfold what is 
given. 

Our bravest of cities, new-born, in the West, 

But re-sounds to the nations this Christly decree ; 
Earth's tribes make response with a magical zest. 
And the glow of broad sympathies sheens earth 
and sea ; 
New Thors strike the hills, larger Joves probe the 

heights, 
All the Vulcans and graces breed use and delights. 



254 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Old creeds — tallow dips lighting schoolineii-walled 
spaces, — 
Are grown pale in large presence of radiance di- 
vine ; 

While labored attempts to "display saintly graces", 
Are eclipsed by "Endeavor", with purpose be- 
nign. 

To save us by nourishing manly emprise, 

As young eagles are taught by brave wing work to 
rise. 

(Freedmen? We can 't sometimes most always tell. 
'Tis nip with all for heaven and tuck 'gainst hell. 
Moses made ground teaching his people God ; 
Our George by statesmanship and tilling sod. 
Their Booker, starting low may travel higher ; 
Adding to the above his forges' sacred fire. 
If masterful in useful arts he makes them, 
The deil must whet his wits who overtakes them. 
This failing, more than likelier than not, 
They'll go from bad to worse, — whine, sell their 
votes, and rot.) 



We '11 raise an Arch of Triumph high, as in great 

days of old. 
And on its massive pillars write a million names in 

gold ; 
And on its key we '11 write His name who gave such 

large success. 
We thought to curb, He meant to kill, The Lord 

our Righteousness. 



THE CIVIL WAR AN EPIC OF THE PERIOD. 255 

And 'neatli this radiance wo '11 walk, each former 

foe and friend ; 
Our captives are not led in chains, but arm in arm. 

we blend. 
Enough long threat 'ning clouds have burst and left 

effulgent skies, — 
One Nation with one purpose all, a feast for royal 

eyes ;— 
Our Plymouth Rock and Jamestown left, our York 

and Bunker Hill, 
The marbles of our patriot sires, each youthful 

heart to thrill ; 
Their spirit in their banner, and their banner in the 

breeze ; 
Their home-graced, fane-graced valleys stretching 

wide 'twixt mighty seas ; 
Left us the foremost land on earth, to stoutly lead 

the van. 
As riper thought is stirring in the families of 

man ; — 
Is stirring wiser, deeper sense of human brother- 
hood ; 
Of Freedom, not sheer birthright, but fief of com- 
mon good ; — 
Fief earned, as our wise fathers taught, like freedom 

in the arts, 
By ken of life's great harmonies, by love of loyal 

hearts. 



256 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

Shall we drop a silent tear for men whose prejudice 

or spleen, 
In this turning and preserving God's dear hand has 

never seen? 
Shall we pause to tell our pity for unfortunates who 

prate 
Of souls just barely large enough to love a single 

state ? 
Need men, (then,) love a neighbor less for pride 

and exultation 
In every name which makes the fame of all this 

glorious Nation? 
We sink the churl beneath the whirl thought's 

mighty wheels are making ; 
We school our souls to higher roles, and help God's 

day that 's breaking. 
As Scotts fought Britons long and well, with chal- 
lenge and abuse, 
And now in British vanguards bear the ashes of 

their Bruce, 
So we may love our childhood homes and sing our 

childhood notes, 
Yet shout "My Country ' tis of thee", wher 'er Old 

Glory floats. 



OLD GLORIA. 257 



OLD GLORIA. 

Old Gloria? What 's that to thee? 

The symbol of thy liberty ; 

A nation's sign that whereso'er 

Its silken folds salute the air 

A million souls shall do and dare 

Against unjust or tyrant hand 

Obstructing freeman's right to stand 

A freeman in a freeman's land. 

The Nation's emblem? What to thee? 
Thy guardian over land and sea ; 
A Nation's pledge that whereso'er 
These silken folds salute the air, 
A million swords shall be made bare 
To guard a freeman where he goes, 
In torrid climes or arctic snows, 
At any call a freeman knows. 

Our father's Flag? What 's that to thee? 
Symbol of thy humanity ; 
A Nation's sign and thine that man 
Is free to follow wisdom's plan 
To compass all the good it can, 
Through comradeship and equity. 
Through every humane quality 
Which gives men title to be free. 



258 CHARACTER NOT CREEDS. 

A lieaveu sent banner? What to thee? 

Symbol of thy divinity. 

Its hues all born in heaven above, 

Claim pledge from thee that thou wilt prove 

True in thy truth as heaven in love ; 

Bind man to man with heavenly tie, 

Swell every breast with sympathy, 

As each hopes heaven to hear his cry. 

Old Gloria, dear Gloria, 
More glad we make our proud huzza. 
That when the starving nations call, 
From fiends whose treachery palls us all, 
Thy sons are brave to break the thrall ; 
Welcome the weak our good to share. 
Our schools, our thought as free as air ; 
And, Gloria, thy kindly care. 



MAY I 1899 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 






019 971 764 9 



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